


Riftwood

by Neyasochi



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Body Horror, Established Keith/Shiro, Impersonation, M/M, Optimistic Ending, Park Ranger/College AU, Psychological Horror, Shapeshifting, Very Minor Character Death, all shiros are just trying their best, and finds he very much likes keith and life in their little cabin in the woods, interdimensional horror kuro borrows shiro's shape and memories, slight gore/mutilation, tiny bit of sex, vldhorrorbang 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-03-24 12:43:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 56,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13811412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neyasochi/pseuds/Neyasochi
Summary: In the year since Takashi Shirogane went missing on the trail, national park ranger Keith has spent all the time he can spare searching the rugged terrain for his boyfriend. But Shiro’s sudden return one summer night brings as much uncertainty as it does relief— amid dark discoveries deep in the woods, Keith finds himself questioning just how deeply Shiro changed during his lost year.





	1. Summit

Firewood crackled and popped, the burning logs shifting against one another as ash and ember replaced freshly cut and split logs. The scent of fire and burned marshmallows filled the warm night air, dredging up better memories of summers past.

Keith had spent the afternoon prepping the firewood, while Lance sunbathed wherever he could find a strong patch of sunlight through the canopy and Pidge perched on a rounded log with her laptop balanced on her knees. The axe he’d used had been sorely in need of sharpening, and the work had taken twice as long as it might’ve otherwise.

So he sharpened it now as he sat on a segment of stout tree trunk that served as one of the many makeshift chairs around the campfire, the axe flat across his lap. It was soothingly mindless work— like splitting firewood, routine auto maintenance, or helping Lance staple flyers together at the park’s central office— done almost through muscle memory alone. The slow, gentle slide of whetstone across the axehead took him back to his earliest camping trips, falling asleep beside his father’s sleeping bag to the sound of sharpening steel.

Keith only half-listened to whatever Lance was telling the herd of summer interns and seasonal volunteers, who sat rapt with attention, gooey s’mores oozing in their hands.

“On the third night, it came again,” Lance said, arms spread as he glanced around the circle. “The sound of nails— no, _claws_ dragging down the door, along the walls, across the windows. But this time, they didn’t go away. Allura— she works up at the observatory on Black Lion Mountain, a solid ten, British accent and _amazing_ eyes— was so scared she was practically wrapped around me.”

Keith blinked slowly as Lance continued to posture and preen, gaze slipping out of focus for a moment as he imagined exactly what Allura would do to Lance if she heard a lick of his tale. A glance toward Hunk was met with an exasperated look and a broad-shouldered shrug.

He tuned out the campfire chatter for a while after that. Lance’s stories were just that— stories. Often memes, sometimes urban legends, and very rarely based in reality.

“I’m serious!” Lance nearly shrieked when some greenhorn ranger expressed doubt about the giant, two-toed footprints he claimed to have found outside of his and Hunk’s cabin one night.

“Shit is out there,” Lance hissed, jabbing his thumb in the directions of the pitch-dark woods behind him. “You start talking to the rangers who’ve been around awhile, and you’ll hear about everything from the Witch of the Woods to body parts turning up on trails to rock carvings in weird alien languages—”

“Oh my God, on the trails?” someone huddled around the fire asked in a tight squeak that rivaled Hunk’s afraid-voice.

Lance perked at the question. “Oh, yeah,” he said, smoothly slipping back into his storytelling voice. “In caves, on hiking trails, wherever. Just random places they really shouldn’t be, you know? And that’s assuming they ever find a body at all. Some people? They just _vanish_ ,” Lance said with a snap of his fingers, “and even the dogs can’t track them down.”

Keith blinked again and found himself staring down at the axe in his lap, the tips of his short, blunt fingernails digging into the whetstone. There was a dull roar in the pit of his stomach that nearly reached his ears— the kind of sound that preceded seeing red and spitting fire.

He’d gotten better at tempering that. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed deep, filling his lungs from the bottom up. The axe in his hands became a solid, comforting weight again— something real to hold, its polished wooden handle still warm from his own touch.

Sometimes, people did vanish. Sometimes, the rangers and dogs couldn’t find them. And sometimes, Keith laid awake with a painfully dry mouth as he tried to reason why.

“You’ve heard of the Baku Garden, right?” Lance asked his captive crowd, unable to stifle a self-satisfied grin as murmurs arose around the fire pit.

Keith kept focused on the blade of his axe—even strokes, both sides, like his father had taught him.

“It’s out there, somewhere,” Lance continued, his voice dropping to a hush. “Unwitting hikers wander in and—bam! A giant, man-eating pitcher plant wolfs them down, spitting up nothing but _bones—_ ”

“No, it doesn’t,” Pidge interrupted from her seat just outside of the campfire circle. She sighed heavily, the firelight glinting off of her glasses as she looked to the volunteers. “If there is a ‘Baku Garden’ out there devouring people, it isn’t with giant flytraps and pitcher plants. It would likely be—judging by the rumors and, you know, _actual reality_ —fungal in nature. A massive network of mushrooms and other fungi, maybe. A colony large enough to digest humans rather quickly. Much of it could even lie underground, actually, given how no one seems to know exactly _where_ this man-eating garden is.”

“I heard it was at the bottom of a pond,” one of the girls sitting around the fire said, glancing around at the others for some agreement.

“My cousin said it’s not so much a garden as a _creature_ ,” another of the new hires added. Keith had seen him working maintenance with Hunk. “Like Bigfoot, but made of carnivorous plants.”

“Your cousin doesn’t know shit from shinola, Rolo,” Lance butted in, eager to retake control of the campfire discussion. “Why would they call it the Baku _Garden_ if it’s a guy walking around--”

“Man, I don’t know,” Rolo snapped back. “It’s all fake anyway. Why are you so twisted up about it?”

“It’s not fake. Are you— are you kidding? I’m sorry, is it normal for someone to go missing and their goo-covered bones to show up a week later? Keith— Keith, back me up here.”

Keith glanced up, past the wide-eyed greenhorns and across the campfire, to where Lance was gesturing to him.

“Keith’s, like, out in those woods twenty-four-seven. He’s the best tracker in the park, so he’s seen some shit. Haven’t you, buddy?”

“Lance!” Pidge hissed as she snapped her laptop shut.

“What? He _has_! Tell them, Keith!” Lance stretched out his arms expectantly, clearly hoping to prompt some confirmation from Keith.

The park ranger swallowed, then worked his jaw from side to side.

“Oh, whatever,” Lance groaned after a few long moments of waiting. He waved off Keith and refocused on the campfire group, roping them all in with a new tale.

Keith made a point not to listen at all this time.

Instead he scrabbled to peel off one of his fingerless gloves and fish the mechanical oil from the pouch at his hip. It only took a few drops to protect the freshly honed blade from rust, and his fingers trembled slightly as he worked the oil into the steel.

He was being stupid, he realized as soon as he sliced open the edge of his index finger. _Careless_.

And his hands still trembled. He swore under his breath as he flicked away the fat drip of blood welling at the tip.

Keith grabbed a fistful of his shirt and stuck his finger inside, squeezing tight to apply pressure as the heather grey cotton soaked up his blood. It was a shirt from one of the first summer programs he’d attended at the park, back when he was only working part-time, seasonally, to help pay for school.

Four or five years in Keith’s wardrobe meant it was already ruined with stains and at least one or two sizable holes. One more dark, bloodied spot meant next to nothing— especially without Shiro here to fret over the laundry anymore.

“Hey,” Pidge said, quiet as she spared a glance at Lance, who was gesturing wildly in the throes of his ghost story. She plunked down in front of Keith in a crouch, resting her laptop on her thighs, careful as ever of coming into contact with _too_ much nature. “You know how excited he gets when there are new people up here, right? He’s not even thinking about Shiro when he says that kind of stuff.”

“Is that supposed to be better?” Keith questioned, eyebrows arching up as he used his thumb to swipe a smear of his blood from the axe’s cheek. “That _Shiro_ being one of those missing people doesn’t occur to him?”

Pidge’s face scrunched up, tight and miserable for a heavy moment.

Keith sighed, tucking away the whetstone into the pack at his waist, and slouched down. The axe still lay across his lap for the moment. He thumbed along the freshly sharpened edge, toying with the pressure, venturing just shy of breaking skin again. “I know,” he sighed. “I know he doesn’t mean anything by it— it’s _Lance_ , after all. And I mean, it’s been over a year. Everyone else has moved on. I should… expect it now.”

“Keith,” she said, half warning and half pleading.

“No one even talks about him anymore,” Keith said with the sudden intensity of heat-lightning, his grip tightening on the axe to stop the tremble that coursed through him again, “unless I bring him up. He just doesn’t occur to anyone else, and it— I’m just— _no one_ is thinking about him,” he said through grit teeth. “Much less thinking of bringing him back, and I…”

“It doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten him,” she said. She drummed her fingers against her laptop and exhaled sharply through her nose, taking a few seconds to let her head clear.

“Would you want company on your next expedition?” Pidge asked. “I know you can cover more ground without me and my, uh, slightly shorter legs, but I’ve been reviewing some of the topographical maps—a couple of the canyons this time—and it might help? I made some tweaks to my search and rescue program, too. And _you_ are the ideal test-user.”

“That… would actually be really helpful,” Keith admitted. He sat a little straighter, already considering the possibilities. He’d raked over the park a hundred times since Shiro disappeared, high and low, but there was only so much he could do alone. “Thanks, Pidge.”

“If nothing else, we’ll collect a lot of data,” she added with a shrug. “You remember that drone Hunk helped me make for my climate research? I’ve been tinkering with him a little, and I think he should be capable of making a full, in-depth survey of the park. I just need to be within a five-mile radius or so.”

He hummed in response. Pidge kept talking—initially explaining the latest improvements to her tracking program, but soon simply thinking aloud as she batted around ideas for improvements. It wasn’t too far over Keith’s head, but the technical talk was better suited for a listener like Hunk. Keith’s grasp on her words was loose enough that his thoughts instead drifted to planning.

He charted an itinerary for his upcoming four-day leave, reviewing and amending his previous plans to include Pidge: which trails to take and where to leave them; the best spots to make camp; how best to accommodate Pidge during their trek through the greenery and dirt she so loathed.

There was a particular corner of the park he was interested in searching— it was riddled with canyons and caves and river-threaded ravines, and as such hadn’t been combed over to the same degree as some other areas within the sprawling forest. That it also lay more than eighty miles from where Shiro had last been seen had been a factor, too.

Keith had investigated it on his own, of course, in the weeks and months following the announcement of Shiro’s presumed death and the end of official search-and-rescue efforts. He couldn’t have done anything else, then, when sleep hardly ever came and he could only lie awake above the covers in their bed, in their cabin just outside the park’s borders, and jitter with energy as he thought of Shiro lost and alone when he should be softly snoring beside Keith.

Nor could he stop now, when Shiro still needed him. Alive or not, he deserved to be home.

“And I realize now that you are not listening to me whatsoever,” Pidge muttered, her eyes slipping shut as she sighed. “That’s fine. Hunk’s really the only one who ever provides me with any meaningful feedback anyway.”

“Sorry,” Keith said, pressing his lips together. “I was thinking about where I wanted to look.”

“Gotcha,” she said, nodding. “Do you want me to call Matt and get a refresher on the details?”

“No,” Keith said, refraining from adding that he didn’t need it. Should his memory ever fade— and it didn’t seem likely— he still had copies of all the police reports and news articles pinned up at home across the bedroom wall. “I want to check out the canyon, anyway. Nowhere near the point last seen.”

Pidge’s thick eyebrows briefly knitted tight. “Isn’t that like… eighty-six miles from the trail they were on?”

He nodded. “Yup.”

She was quiet for a long, drawn moment. “You’re not going to make me walk all that way, are you?”

“Nope.” He stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. “But I am going to get Hunk to come, too. Then I can leave the two of you alone to do your drone searching while I check out some of the ravines.”

“You know I don’t need a babysitter, right?” Pidge questioned.

“Are you kidding? Your dad would _kill me_ if I left you alone out there for five minutes. Matt would kill me. Shiro would kill me.”

Her smile was soft, if a little embarrassed.

Keith and Pidge went quiet as the circle around the campfire broke for the night, the dozen or so interns and new employees walking past in groups of two or three with lanterns in-hand, murmuring goodnights. The parking lot and on-site cabins weren’t far down the hill, and their voices still drifted through the night air long after they were all out of sight.

“Hey, asshole,” Lance drawled as he and Hunk approached. He kept his hands jabbed deep in the pockets of his navy jacket. “Thanks for leaving me twisting in the wind earlier.”

Keith crossed his arms and met Lance’s peeved stare with one of his own making. “Why do you even talk about that stuff anyway? You’ve never gone off-trail once. Wait— have you even gone more than five-hundred feet from one of the buildings? Ever?”

“Uh, no, and I plan on keeping it that way,” Lance muttered, crossing his arms over the ash-flecked park employee tee he wore under his jacket. “I know you’re probably like… secret buds with the Batsquatch, but some of us actually wanna avoid the creepy woods and its creepy cryptids.”

“Whatever,” Keith grunted. “I just don’t want you scaring off potential rangers.”

“Oh, come on, Keith,” Lance snorted out. “I’d be doing them a favor. Besides, Hunk’s heard all of that and more and he’s still here, so it’s clearly not a great deterrent.”

“Uh, I’m here for credits, mainly,” Hunk interjected. “And a nice little paycheck for making easy repairs.”

“Hell, he even goes out there in the woods with you,” Lance continued, his nose wrinkling. “Still hasn’t been enough to send him running. Has it, buddy?” he asked, throwing his arm around Hunk’s wide shoulders. “These woods don’t scare you!”

“In the day? No, not at all,” Hunk squeaked out. “But at night? Like right now? Living, breathing darkness looming in from all sides and no way of knowing what’s watching us?”

“Hunk,” Lance said, drawing out his friend’s name. “Chill. Relax. You’re giving me goosebumps.”

“Ugh,” Pidge said, slowly rotating her arm. “I’ve got them, too. That’s… weird.”

“I’m just saying,” Hunk continued, curling in on himself, “there’s nothing like living in a tiny cabin in one of the largest remaining national parks to make you remember why humans have been afraid of the night since the dawn of time. Like, growing up, you think the dark is your room without a nightlight, or the closet when you leave the door open. Being out here is like, that times ten-thousand. Can you imagine being out here with no light? No fire?”

Hunk paused to glance up at the narrows ribbons of deep, star-smattered sky that were visible between the shadowed forest canopy. “We’re talking like… _primordial_ dark.”

A distant sound followed, barely perceptible.

“What was that?” Keith asked, head whipping in the direction he’d caught it from. His brow furrowed sharp, tense; he stood silently, grip tight around the heft of his axe.

“Oh, very funny, Keith,” Lance said dryly. He mimed clapping. “Where were these theatrics earlier?”

“I’m serious,” Keith sneered at him. “I heard something.”

At once Lance went from annoyedly amused to downright sour. “Oh, no, no, _no_ ,” he rattled off, straightening up to stare Keith in the eye. “You totally put a damper on my thing and _now_ you wanna play along and spook everyone? Get real!”

“Would you shut up for two seconds?”

“Would _you_ shut up for two seconds?” Lance snapped back.

Another noise from the dark thatch of woods pierced the air, nearer and louder.

Lance froze. “What was that?” he nearly whimpered.

“The noise I heard a minute ago, but closer,” Keith hissed between clenched teeth.

He was distantly aware of how the other three fell into line behind him, like he was a bulwark against strange sounds in the forest. Pidge’s hands were knotted in the fabric of his cropped jacket, and judging by Lance’s wheezing, Hunk had an iron-tight grip on him as well.

Keith advanced slowly, angling his body as he went. The axe switched hands for the meantime, and he found himself contemplating fishing his mother’s oversized hunting dagger from his boot.

“Keith! Keith, what are you doing? Why are you leading us _toward_ the danger?” Lance hissed. “Oh my God, this is _classic_ Keith!”

“I’m investigating,” Keith ground out. “And I’m not _leading_ any of you. Go back and get in the truck.”

“Yeah, we’ll just wait in the truck like delicious canned meat,” Hunk hissed from somewhere behind him.

“We’re not ditching you, Keith,” Pidge said, one of her hands pressing resolutely against the middle of his back.

“Anywhere your stupid, reckless ass goes, we’re gonna follow,” Lance agreed, sounding resigned to his fate.

The noise came again, and this time Keith thought he recognized it. Something about it, anyway.

His heartbeat thrummed high in his throat, pulse racing so quickly that his head went light. He crossed the tree line anyway, pushing through underbrush and the hair-fine threads of a spider’s web.

They weren’t more than thirty feet from the campfire, but already the light seemed as far away as the stars. Keith hadn’t thought to grab a lantern from the truckbed, and neither had anyone else, apparently. He struggled to adjust to the sudden depth of darkness, too long used to the warm glow of firelight. Between the trees, shadows stretched deeper than the eye could fathom.

Keith took his next steps cautiously— even this close to their little settlement in the wilderness, accidents could happen. He’d witnessed them. He’d been on those calls; he’d recovered those bodies. In the deep of night, without any flashlight or lantern, it was all too easy to get turned around or stumble down a rocky ravine.

He moved more by instinct than sight, constantly glancing back past Hunk, Lance, and Pidge to gauge their distance from the campfire— now just a warm, yellow glow distantly visible through the trees. Their panicked breathing was loud in his ears, threatening to drown out any chance of pinpointing the noise he was following.

There was a sudden snapping of branches from up the slope of the hill; the crunch of something heavy moving through the underbrush, careless of how much sound it made. Keith could only think at first of a wounded animal, how dying elk and boars would hurtle wildly through the woods until they succumbed to their injuries, too frantic to give thought to anything but escape.

He stretched out his arm and angled himself in front of the others, as if it would better protect them from a sickly bear or—

“Keith,” was the pained cry that rang from the thrashing through the woods, agonized to the point it could almost be mistaken for something inhuman.

“What the fuck,” Lance whispered somewhere behind him.

“Shiro?” Keith whispered. He took a step forward and his leg nearly buckled. The next step was surer. “Shiro? _Shiro_?” he called, louder each time.

“Keith! Keith,” the voice— _Shiro’s voice_ — answered.

“I’m calling Iverson now!” Pidge screamed somewhere behind him, already distant. “He’ll get a crew up here.”

Keith bolted up the rest of the hill without another thought, zeroed in on the direction of Shiro’s intermittent, pleading cries. It was just his name, over and over, but with such raw desperation that each call was like a lance to Keith’s gut.

What little light the stars could give didn’t reach the forest floor; he kept advancing, nearly blind, the world around him a deep greyscale of trees and sloping earth. Shiro’s ragged, broken voice was the guiding star he followed, drawing him deeper into the woods, all thoughts of the distant firelight slipping away.

He vaulted over the waist-high trunk of a fallen red cedar, the worn tread of his tennis shoes slipping over leaves and pine straw as he made to run as soon as he landed.

He stopped short. There, barely five feet away, bent pitifully against the base of a stout fir, was Shiro.

Keith stumbled to him, in wonder and horror at the sight. He tried to speak Shiro’s name and couldn’t; his breaths verged on hyperventilating, and his legs bent as easily as saplings given a slight tug.

He dropped into a clumsy kneel beside Shiro, close enough to touch him. Clammy sweat broke out on his skin as he reached out, suddenly afraid.

But his hands met solid flesh— bare, dirt-caked, rough with callouses and scabs and healed wounds— and long, matted hair. The reassurance of feeling him took the edge off of Keith’s panic. His touches turned exploratory, feeling for injuries, though he felt like all of his first responder training was worth little and less without light or a first-aid kit.

“Shiro?” he croaked out when he realized that Shiro’s flesh and bone ended abruptly just above his right elbow.

“Keith,” was all Shiro groaned softly into the palm that cradled his face.

“Oh my God,” Hunk said above and behind him, startling Keith to a jolt. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my _God_ ,” Hunk continued, still wheezing for breath. “We’ve gotta get him out of here, Keith! We gotta… we gotta go right now immediately.”

Keith barely had time to agree before Hunk was swooping in to heave Shiro to his feet, gentle even as he tugged and pulled the man into some semblance of standing.

The movement still gave Shiro enough pain that he groaned, vocal in his agony even as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

Keith winced as he slid against Shiro’s right side and wrapped an arm around his waist to help support him. It was worrying how light he was. Keith couldn’t help but wonder how much of the missing weight was from the arm he’d lost.

“Are you okay, Keith?” Hunk asked as they quickly navigated the slope back down to the campsite, balancing their urgency with a mutual desire to spare Shiro as much rough movement as possible.

“Me?” Keith asked, the question taking a moment to sink in. “I’m fine. I’m… okay.”

He’d dropped his axe somewhere along the way— he didn’t know where— and a small pang somewhere in his ribs made itself known. That one had been his father’s.

The wan glow of the campsite’s firelight was punctuated by the sharper red and blue of flashing sirens. Voices rang through the woods, and rangers, officers and paramedics swarmed Keith and Hunk even before they broke through the tree line.

Keith played host to a whole new set of fears and worries on the ride to the hospital, pressed into the corner as the ambulance crew fluttered around Shiro’s still form.

The oddest ones were the mundane thoughts that intruded even as he watched the EMTs inject syringe after syringe into Shiro and puzzle over the too-clean cut of his arm. There’d be so much paperwork, he thought. He’d need to call Shiro’s parents, which was always tricky without Shiro there to jump in and translate.

But the worst thought was that maybe he’d only gotten Shiro back in time to watch him die.

 

—————

 

Lying in the antiseptic white of his hospital bed, Shiro somehow looked worse than he had when he’d stumbled out of the woods, naked and ringed in grime.

On clean skin, his scars seemed more pronounced. Or maybe it was the bright fluorescent bulbs lining the ceiling panels, or some mix of the two. The one that slashed across his face was strikingly deep and discolored, and Keith couldn’t imagine how the scar— so smooth across the bridge of his nose— had come to be. But if it seemed too even-handed to be the result of an animal or the abuse of the wilds, then the myriad scars that laced up the remains of Shiro’s right arm were far worse to consider.

Shiro lay suspended in an induced semi-sleep, a spell maintained by the steady drip of a bag into the IV linked to his left hand. He needed the rest, desperately, though the way he twitched and tossed in his slumber was far from reassuring. At times, Shiro’s movements were sharp, disjointed, _painful_ -looking.

At times, Keith wanted to look away, even as he held Shiro’s hand between his own and rubbed his thumb back and forth over his blanched knuckles.

But he made himself watch, his face no doubt twisting in expressions of sympathetic suffering. He wondered what Shiro’s nightmares were made of as he dug his nails into the arm of the hospital chair, wishing he could rake through the cheap turquoise pleather and particle wood.

Maybe another coffee run would help distract him.

The quiet buzz of the fluorescent lights made the walk to the vending machine creepier than he’d have liked; moonless nights in the wilderness unsettled him less than institutional buildings did after close.

He pointedly ignored the lone nurse sitting behind the station at the end of the hall as he paid into a vending machine that dispensed hot coffee. He’d had every flavor twice, though he honestly couldn’t say that he’d noticed any difference between them. Keith was grateful for whatever strings Mr. Holt had pulled to allow him more or less unrestricted visitation with Shiro, and he tried to attract as little attention as possible as he made his way through the hospital with his coffee in hand.

The sight of Shiro surrounded by a wilting garden of flowers struck him every time he entered the room. It was a little too close to death as he’d seen it on TV— reposed in a casket, blanketed in flowers. Worlds apart from his own father’s spartan funeral, which was the only kind he’d ever attended.

Keith paused beside the bed. Clear tubes snaked their way across Shiro’s chest, down his arms, over his face. A shock of bone-white hair was plastered to Shiro’s forehead by clammy sweat; some doctor had attributed the change to extreme stress, which at least made sense to Keith, even if he’d never seen or heard of the like before.

Shiro was quiet, at least. Maybe at peace.

Keith used his free hand to smooth back the damp hair that clung to Shiro’s forehead. He gently raked his nails through the long locks fanned across the pillow, until mats and tangles hindered his progress, and then made to return to his chair.

“Keith?”

Shiro’s voice was barely a rasp, brittle with lack of use. Keith’s name was a tentative question—an uncertain venture, as if he was afraid there would be no reply.

“Shiro? Shiro, I’m here,” Keith said, back at his side in an instant. His elbow knocked into a vase and sent it over the side of the white bedside table, along with a box of tissues and a crumpled bag of McDonald’s from lunch.

Shiro's eyes barely cracked open, dark grey irises only just visible through the long, thick lashes that set them so well. He blinked— slow first, then a sudden flutter as his gaze fixed on Keith.

Keith found his own relief mirrored in Shiro’s expression. Under other circumstances, a thousand miles removed from the recent torment and trauma, he’d have teased the man for how thoroughly he melted at the sight of Keith—watering eyes, upturned brows, his breaths quick and labored from the glut of emotion.

“Keith,” Shiro said again, so low it barely passed his throat.

There was something in those gunmetal grey eyes then that Keith didn’t quite expect to see, and it snagged his attention even as he tried to focus on comforting Shiro. Alongside the relief and almost-tears was a slight squint, a faint knit in his brow, a look of near wonder. Shiro stared at Keith like full recognition hadn’t yet kicked in, or else he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

Keith averted the quiet breaking of his heart—or at least managed not to show it too badly, he thought.

“I’m right here,” he reminded Shiro, repeating the same words he’d been saying for days. It took a few thick swallows to check the emotions that threatened to spill out over the both of them.

He’d thought he’d worked through the worst of this on that first night in the hospital. Then, he’d had the benefit of their friends—Hunk and Allura positioned protectively around him to shelter him from prying eyes in the waiting room, Pidge and Coran handling the front desk, and Lance flitting around to find tissues, junk food, and anything else Keith might want for. 

But right now it was just him and Shiro. Shiro, who looked to be struggling as much as he was, wide-eyed and fraught with the beginnings of a panic that Keith feared might bloom into something more severe.

“I’ll go get a doctor,” Keith said. The tumult of feeling remained, swelling inside of him with each breath and threatening to leave no room for his frantic lungs or his beating heart, but concern for Shiro helped to numb it for the time. “It’s okay, Shiro. You’re—you’re okay. I’ll be right back, okay?”

“No, no,” Shiro said, managing to snatch his wrist in a surprisingly fierce grip.

A soft noise escaped him as Shiro’s hand loosened its hold and found his, the numerous tubes from IVs and the heartbeat monitor taped around his finger catching on the bed’s rail.

“No, not yet. Please? Keith— _Keith_ , I’m so happy to see you. Please don’t go.”

“Don’t worry,” Keith told him, a wry smile breaking through. “I’m not going anywhere,” he assured Shiro. “And neither are you. Not without two satellite phones and military-grade GPS and a five-hundred-fifty-pound-weight paracord tethering you to me.”

“That’s fair,” Shiro sighed, his head sinking back down into the stack of pillows. Reassured that Keith wouldn’t leave just yet, he relaxed from head to toe.

Keith lingered. He brushed along the jut of Shiro’s cheekbone, the strong cut of his jaw, blunt and dirt-darkened nails ruffling the the sparse beard Shiro had managed to grow over the last year.

Through his drowsing stupor, Shiro moaned softly and turned into the touch. Half-conscious, he still sought out Keith’s hands, the warmth of his palms; his expression finally softened, at last eased by Keith’s presence.

The following days passed by in a flurry that left Keith worn to the bone. Scaling mountains was less exhausting than spending hours on the phone dealing with hospital social workers and the insurance company, maneuvering himself and Shiro through a web of sticky red tape and technicalities. He found himself grateful for the occasional drive back home to raid the safe for some important document and take a shower; Hunk even shuttled him a few times, allowing Keith to nap against the window for the hour-long ride.

In a ratty spiral notepad, he maintained a detailed set of notes regarding Shiro’s condition from the steady stream of nurses and doctors. Explanations and diagnoses piled up through the week. Some he’d expected: the signs of exposure, the PTSD, the obvious injuries. Others left him, and the doctors as well, with more questions than answers: no signs of starvation or malnutrition, the clean removal of his arm, the amnesia.

“I remember leaving the trail,” Shiro told him one afternoon after the police took their leave from his room, as evening settled in and his discharge loomed ahead. His hand went to his temple, fingertips pressing so hard to his skin that it blanched from the pressure. “But I don’t know why.”

Keith remained quiet. Nothing made sense, and he wished for a moment that he had Hunk or Pidge by his side to process everything and explain it to him— _slowly_ , after a decent night’s sleep and a full pot of coffee.

Iverson’s visit had been brief and wide-eyed. He’d congratulated Keith on bringing Shiro home and chalking up another successful rescue. And then they’d talked about the odds— the unbelievable chances, the sheer misfortune. How Shiro, of all people, could get so lost so suddenly; why he’d ever venture off a trail alone. How they couldn’t manage to find him for a year, when he was apparently wandering the woods all the while.

As massive as the wilderness in their park was, a year was an almost inexplicably long time to survive without coming across some trail, some hiker, some path back to civilization. Stranger still for Shiro to turn up in relatively good health—excepting the imperfectly healed fractures and his sheared off arm.

A clean cut, just above his elbow. The grid of deep scars that spread from the point of amputation, looking almost deliberate— almost _medical_.

The fog of Shiro’s amnesia kept answers at bay, and Keith had no intention of raking Shiro over the coals for details he couldn’t recall. He had no intention of allowing others to do so, either, which had led to the detectives’ abrupt exit earlier that afternoon.

He pulled up news from Allura about the observatory to distract Shiro from his own inward gaze, one of his hands firm on the man’s shoulder as gently guided the tablet into Shiro’s hands— one still warm flesh and the other a new and fairly high-tech prosthetic that Pidge had fawned over for the better part of an hour.

“Some of Coran’s work got published,” Keith said as he flicked through articles while Shiro held the tablet steady. “And Allura sent over all these files… it might be every bit of data they recorded while you were gone,” he snorted. “For you to peruse. Try to remember to let it charge.”

“Thanks,” Shiro said, smiling— if a little uncertainly— as he set the tablet to the side without another glance.

Keith’s eyebrows went up. “Huh. I was thinking I’d have to pry that thing from your hands,” he muttered.

“Oh. I just… I don’t want to think about work yet.” Shiro hesitated, both during his speech and in a long, lagging second afterward. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” Keith answered gently. “You don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to worry about anything. I’m going to take care of you,” Keith said before stretching and giving into a jaw-popping yawn.

The slow spread of Shiro’s smile caught him off-guard. “Like that time I had the flu?”

“Which time?” Keith asked absently.

Shiro was fastidious about cleanliness and avoiding germs to the point of detriment. His immune system had all the defense of a peewee football team, and thanks to a stubborn refusal to slow down for even the worst bouts of illness, the man was an absolute nightmare to care for.

Still, Keith tried. “Usually you’re delirious by the time you finally lie down and let me do anything for you.”

Shiro’s smile turned to a thoughtful frown, his gaze drifting for what turned into several long, quiet seconds.

Keith crossed his arms and waited. He tried to recall everything the neurologist had explained about Shiro’s amnesia and how it presented, but his own memory had gone foggy. Too many days of listless sleep on uncomfortable hospital furniture and the constant back-and-forth as he tried to return Shiro’s affairs to some semblance of order.

And anyway, Shiro slipped back into the present shorty after. “You… make good chicken and dumplings.”

“The kind my grandma made,” Keith said with a little puff of his chest.

“You only saw her around New Year’s,” Shiro added, almost to himself.

Keith nodded anyway. “She always made me eat black-eyed peas and greens, too. I hated it then, but… but I think I want to start doing that again. Making that kind of stuff.” 

“That sounds nice,” Shiro said, the side of his mouth quirking slightly as he relaxed back against the pillows and incline of the bed. “You know, I’ve been wondering what the smell in this room reminds me of,” he said, almost lazy as he lolled his head back and looked at Keith.

“Antiseptic hell?”

“Underneath that.”

Keith considered a dying bunch of tulips beside him. “Floral graveyard?”

“No. I finally remembered.” Shiro leaned forward. “It smells like your _dorm room_.”

Keith eased back and drew in a cautious sniff. “It smells fine?”

“Sweaty socks and old McDonald’s,” Shiro laughed, jostling the thin tubes that looped from under his chin to his nose. He craned his neck, ostensibly searching the room for the offending fast food. “ _Eau du Keith_ ,” he teased.

He’d called it that the first time Keith had brought him to his dorm room, too. Back then, it had made him go red from cheek to cheek, the back of his neck flushing hot as nervous sweat prickled him all over.

Now? Keith knew exactly how to respond.

“Scoot over,” he said as he stepped on the heels of his boots and slid his feet free one at a time.

“What?” Shiro asked, straightening up as Keith pushed down the railing and swung a leg onto the hospital bed. “I don’t think—”

“It was able to hold us both when I had that awful fucking kidney stone.”

Shiro made a weak sound of acknowledgment that turned halfway into a protest. “Wait, why are your feet up here by me? Put those things away.” He even covered his nose for effect.

“Better get used to it,” Keith said, wriggling his socked feet. He nudged at a ticklish spot along Shiro’s ribs with his toes, earning him a reflexive laugh followed by a dry glare and a resolute pout. “The cabin’s been all mine for a year. It’s like dorm room two-point-oh now.”

Shiro's brow knitted with genuine worry.

“I’m teasing,” Keith clarified, amused to see Shiro instantly melt against the mountain of pillows behind him. “They didn’t let me totally crash and burn without you around,” he said, breath catching for a second.

A glance up revealed Shiro watching him with an awkward, rueful smile.

“I mean, it’s fine. I got through it fine. The cabin is ok, I mean,” he said with a flippant wave of his arm. “It’s not as bad as my dorm room was, but I’ll still air it out when we get home. I kept using your favorite detergent, so all the towels and stuff should still smell how you like it. I even got a new washer. You’re gonna flip when you see it,” Keith grinned.

“A new washing machine?”

He had imagined Shiro’s reaction when he picked it out; could practically see Shiro peering inside every machine on the floor, oohing over water efficiency, and price-checking each model on his phone. He’d picked the one he thought Shiro would’ve liked the most.

“For Christmas,” Keith nodded. “It was… my present to myself, I guess.”

“Keith. I’m sorry,” Shiro said softly. His fingers twitched slightly, his hand curling in on itself. His tight not-quite-smile covered a painfully uncomfortable search for words. “Sad Christmas, huh?”

“It was,” Keith agreed carefully. There had been no fresh evergreen in the living room, no lights on the front porch, none of Shiro’s immaculately wrapped gifts sitting picture-perfect by the fireplace. Allura and Hunk had done their best to cheer him, but cider and Christmas movies did nothing for the bleak midwinter dread that grew in him as the light faded and the snowdrifts deepened and he _knew_ — even if his heart was stubborn enough to whisper otherwise— that there was no way Shiro could possibly survive a winter alone in the wilderness, if he had managed to last even that long.

But he supposed there were worse ways to bottom out after a devastating loss—skipping work to drive into town and buy large appliances could at least halfway pass as responsible adulting.

“I got a new freezer, too. Iverson set me up with a lot of venison. Also, I broke your rice cooker,” Keith hurried to confess, “but I replaced it with that one you always had your eye on. Oh, and I bought a roomba. Pidge gave it some upgrades, though, so watch out.”

“Watch out?” Shiro echoed, squinting as he turned his head.

“Just watch out,” Keith repeated. It was always learning, and he suspected Pidge might even be able to control it remotely now. “I think its loyalties lie with her now.”

“Right,” Shiro said, nodding slowly. “Okay.”

“Don’t put your head too close to the floor for now,” Keith added, miming long hair until Shiro made a little sound of understanding. “It got me once while I was working on something under the sink.”

“Actually,” Shiro said as he twisted the tip of a tangled lock between his fingers, “do you think you could do me a favor?”

 

—————

 

Shiro wouldn’t admit it, not in a thousand years, but Keith mangled the haircut.

“If anything, I like it better this way, Keith. Honestly.” Shiro stooped to peer in the mirror on the door of Keith’s truck, brushing his hand up the short-cropped hair along the back of his head.

“The front’s too short and the sides are too long.” Keith felt himself pouting and could do nothing to stop it.

“It’s fine, Keith.” He raked his fingers through the tuft of white above his forehead. “It’s more the color I’m worried about.”

“Why?”

“You don’t think it’s a little… skunk-like?”

“Well, now I do,” Keith said, smiling as he heard Shiro grumbling after him on the way up the steps.

“Are you hungry?” Keith asked as soon as he unlocked the front door and kicked it open.

Inside, he set down the bags stuffed with his and Shiro’s dirty clothes from the hospital. He flung his keys into a cast iron bowl on the kitchen island; the ringing clunk as they hit was a reassuring note of _home, finally_.

He turned back when Shiro never answered and found the other man taking uncertain, staggered steps into the cabin.

Shiro had left the door open behind him. His eyes were drawn along the wooden beams to the slowly rotating ceiling fan. His gaze drifted around the room, a soft wonder evident in the parting of his lips, and when at last his gaze settled back on Keith, Shiro smiled.

“You changed the furniture,” he commented as he ambled to the dining room table and laid his hand on the back of one of the new chairs.

“I, uh, had to,” Keith said. He tugged off his gloves and went for the fridge, grabbing a trash bag along the way.

Between the legal and medical hurdles and his park obligations and the pressing need to remain by Shiro’s side at every possible moment, Keith hadn’t had a chance to really get the cabin ready for Shiro’s return. It wasn’t a total goddamn mess, but it wasn’t _good_ , either.

“There were a couple of times that I just… wasn’t handling things well.” With his hip holding the refrigerator door open, Keith started tossing food almost indiscriminately. There were a dozen styrofoam and plastic containers harboring leftovers from restaurants and drive-thrus. Behind that lay forgotten tupperware holding the remains of the home-cooked meals Hunk dropped off a few times a week.

“Oh. Understandable,” Shiro said. He came to Keith’s side, head gently cocked as he watched him clear the fridge shelf-by-shelf. “I think it looks better than the old dining room set, anyway.”

“Allura picked it out.”

“Ah. Okay. That makes sense,” Shiro agreed as he glanced back at the tastefully carved table and chairs.

The fridge was sparsely stocked by the time Keith finished. He left the condiments and pickled vegetables alone; aside from those, just a handful of items he’d recently purchased made the cut.

They were the essentials— soy milk, eggs, sandwich supplies, and any Shiro-favorites that Keith had happened to pass during his harried grocery runs of late.

“Here,” Keith said, turning to gently toss a small plastic tub to Shiro.

The other man caught it, his right hand fumbling slightly, and turned it over in his hands as if uncertain what to do. “What’s this?”

“Tapioca pudding,” Keith said as he kneed the fridge shut. He felt his eyebrows lift as he glanced from Shiro to the container of pudding. “Your favorite?”

“Oh. _Oh_.”

Keith headed to the living room and tried to keep his worries to himself.

Was _that_ normal to forget? Could memories from long before Shiro’s disappearance be affected, too? Had the neurologist mentioned it while Keith was fighting to stay awake? He thought miserably of the pages of notes he’d taken while at the hospital and contemplated just calling up the doctor for an answer instead.

Two steps later, and Keith was already chiding himself for overreacting— Shiro had only just come home and had yet to acclimate himself to their old life after a yearlong trauma that Keith suspected was worse than he could imagine; after all, Shiro’s mind was trying to protect him, still, from what he had endured.

Keith flopped heavily onto the couch and pressed his face into the plush arm.

Shiro’s steps followed less than a minute later, and by turning his head, Keith was able to watch as he swaggered into the living room with the pudding in hand and an oversized serving spoon in his mouth.

He more or less fell onto the couch beside Keith, smiling in between bites. “I _missed_ this,” he said, and Keith wasn’t sure if it was specifically about the tapioca pudding or more to do with being home in general.

Shiro took a deep breath. “You even got the kind that doesn’t bother my stomach—”

Keith ended up laughing. He pushed his fingers through his hair, brushing back the long fringe and locks that tickled his shoulders. “That’s like… as much for my benefit as it is for yours.”

“True,” Shiro agreed as he scraped the plastic tub clean and thoroughly licked the spoon, too.

Keith eventually rolled off of the couch to start getting the house in order— his first act being to introduce Shiro to the new washing machine and sit back as his boyfriend oohed and aahed and studied the appliance like it was his first time seeing one.

There was a self-satisfied pride in that, and Keith wouldn’t deny it. He grinned, arms crossed loosely over his chest, as he watched Shiro’s entire upper body disappear into the washer.

There were clean clothes still waiting to be folded, too— Shiro’s clothes, all of them, piled on the bed. Keith had clung to them for the better part of a year, before Shiro’s scent faded and seeing them daily grew more painful than comforting. He’d packed them away in airtight compression bags, safe from moisture and insects and other mundane threats.

And mercifully, he’d been granted a reason to haul them back down from the attic.

“Glad you kept all this,” Shiro said as he neatly folded a pair of bootcut jeans and sat them atop a pile of his other clothes.

“Of course,” Keith said after a minute or more of silence had lapsed. “I mean, I… I want to say that I knew you’d come home, but I— I kept looking. I hoped. I _prayed_ , even, and you know I don’t—”

“I know,” Shiro told him, dropping a shirt mid-fold to round the corner of the bed and wrap him in a hug. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find my way here.”

Keith let himself slowly collapse against Shiro. They hadn’t been able to hold each other in the hospital as Shiro recovered— not really— or even kiss, and all at once he craved it.

“This is nice,” Shiro murmured into his hair.

Keith’s laugh was muffled against Shiro’s chest and the sweater worn over it. “Are you cold?” he asked, turning his head so his cheek was squished against Shiro’s front.

“No. I’m fine.”

Keith blindly found Shiro’s hand, loosely curled around his lower back, and gave it a light squeeze. “Your fingers are cold,” he noted aloud as he moved onward and upward, blazing past Shiro’s murmured denials. He touched Shiro’s cheek with his knuckles, gauging his temperature with the back of his hand. “Are you sure you’re okay? You feel like you’ve been in a refrigerator—”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Shiro insisted, enough edge in his voice that Keith blinked and withdrew his hand. He softened immediately and added, “Just… tired of people asking if I’m okay, lately. I’m okay.”

“I get it,” Keith said. He settled back on his heels and found some measure of comfort in how Shiro clung to him anew, hands cupped loose about his waist, apparently reluctant to let him part too far.

“Sorry.” Shapely brows drew in, thoughtful, and for a moment Keith was stricken by how much Shiro had aged and changed over the last year. The prominent scar across his nose and the white fringe that crested his head were obvious; less so was the slight daze of confusion that seemed to linger just behind his eyes, the absent twitches of his right hand, the slight hollowing of his cheeks that left his face sharp and haggard in the wrong light. “Didn’t mean to get snippy.”

“You don’t need to be sorry,” Keith said. “I know you run cold and all, but—” He sighed and let his forehead thud against Shiro’s broad front. “Please just _tell me_ if you’re coming down with something, okay?”

“Of course,” Shiro said somewhere above Keith’s head.

Keith couldn’t help but roll his eyes. “‘Of course,’” he mimicked, a snort on its heels. As if it was so easy— as if Shiro had ever done anything but tell baldfaced lies until he wound up on the verge of passing out at work with a skin-melting fever.

“I promise, Keith. I couldn’t be better,” he said, arms clasping tight around Keith. “All things considered.”

Keith turned his head to press against Shiro’s sternum, relaxing against the firm muscle and bone that lay above the soft beat of his heart. “All things considered,” Keith agreed with a heavy exhale through his nose.

The moment stretched, and Keith was happy to let it linger. Shiro’s hug wasn’t quite the same— his new arm felt different, and he held onto Keith gingerly, almost delicately.

“You know, I think I know something that could make you feel even better,” Keith teased, low enough that Shiro had to dip his head to catch it.

He led the man by the hand, grinning as Shiro’s smile turned perplexed when Keith tugged him out the front door.

Around the corner of the cabin stood their simple carport; it had been Keith’s first project back when they first moved in, topping a list that had only grown through the years. Simple and sturdy and associated with fond memories— like Shiro bringing him cold Gatorade while he worked, openly impressed by Keith’s handiness— the carport faithfully protected his and Shiro’s most loved possessions.

Keith let go of Shiro and nearly skipped ahead to pull at the edge of a leaf-flecked tarp; it gave way, slipping off of the massive vehicle to pool on the ground at his feet. “Your baby,” he announced as he turned to Shiro, who stood stock-still some feet away with his hands cupped in front of his face.

“My baby,” Shiro laughed after a second’s pause. He ambled closer, still smiling, and ran his hand along the side of the black Jeep.

There were a few spider webs here and there—inevitable and inescapable in their wooded patch of land—and Keith quickly brushed away as many of them as he could. A thin layer of dust clung to parts of the Jeep, but other than that it looked almost as good as Shiro had left it.

“Thank you for looking after it,” Shiro said after he’d rounded the vehicle, all smiles and light, exploratory touches. “Did you drive it at all?” he asked, glancing down curiously at the tarp.

“Every few weeks,” Keith said softly, “just to keep it running.”

“You could’ve used it more, if you wanted.”

“I didn’t want to. I mean, I didn’t— I didn’t want to mess it up or anything. It’s yours, after all.” Keith leaned back against one of the stout wooden poles that held up the carport. “I’d just drive it into town to get gas and stop by the self-wash place and get it to a nice polish. Keep things up to your standards.”

Shiro laughed as he pointedly cast a look at Keith’s beat-up pickup truck, its faded crimson paint barely visible under layers of mud and fine dirt.

“Don’t,” Keith warned.

Shiro held up his hands peaceably, though it took a few tries to stop laughing. “Hey, do you want to go for a ride? Like we used to.”

It took time to get going. Shiro’s new prosthetic made it harder for him to use the stick, and a year without time behind the wheel necessitated a quick refresher from Keith on the basics of driving.

The lesson dragged out over an hour or two— less because Shiro had trouble remembering which pedal was the gas and which was the brake and more because they both had a tendency to lapse into some memory or other and spiral down the rabbit hole.

By the time Keith deemed him ready for the road, the sun was beginning to slip away— as was Shiro’s usual patience.

“Got it, got it,” Shiro murmured as he backed the Jeep out with a few hard stops and starts.

“What the hell, did they give you a lead foot, too?” Keith asked as they tore down the long drive to the main access road.

Shiro laughed as he eased off the gas—only a bit—and took them onto the paved highway toward town.

The black Jeep roared through otherwise quiet woods, engine churning as Shiro pushed past the posted limit. It was a little breakneck, a bit thrilling. It was closer to Keith’s own manner of driving— though his tiny pickup didn’t quite muscle along the road like Shiro’s Jeep managed to— and if anyone but Shiro was behind the wheel, Keith would’ve been plastered to the seat with anxiety.

He couldn’t help but grip the seat and grin as they caught air on a small ridge in the road, a breathless laugh slipping free as his stomach flipped from the sensation. It wasn’t like Shiro to crack fifty miles per hour on this stretch, and as much as Keith totally _got it_ , he was still fully prepared to give Shiro hell for it later on— it was only fair, considering how many times his boyfriend had lectured him for doing the very same.

“Ice cream?” Shiro asked, barely audible over the whipping of the wind through the open doors and the crooning of the radio as Keith worked to find a station they both liked.

“Uh, I hope you brought your wallet,” Keith half-yelled as he finally settled on a channel that played a good mix of alt rock and pop hits. “Because I didn’t.”

“Shit.”

Keith slid in his seat as the Jeep pulled onto the shoulder and skidded into a quick u-turn.

“Wait, you didn’t even have your license on you?” he chided as Shiro raced back to the cabin. The woods along either side of them passed in something just shy of a blur, the spaces in between the trees going dark as the sun began to dip behind the mountains.

“I was excited,” Shiro said with a shrug. “I was thinking about hot fudge.”

Keith snorted and let the issue slide. Seeing Shiro cut loose, grinning as wind tousled the bone-white fringe along his widow’s peak, wasn’t worth spoiling. It was worth it to see Shiro easily clear the staircase on his way back inside the house when only a day earlier he’d still been laid up in the hospital, stark and sunken and surrounded by the wilting gifts of well-wishers.

He barely managed to catch his wallet as Shiro tossed it through his side of the Jeep and then leapt back into the driver’s seat.

The drive to town was like Keith always remembered— fragrant summer night air whistling past, Shiro singing along beautifully to whatever played over the radio, the heavy scent of woodsy pine slowly giving way to the blander smells of fumes and fast food.

By the time they reached the medium-sized university town, Shiro had remastered the stick-shift, though he still misjudged the drive-thru terribly and had to open the door and get out to pay and collect their order at the window.

They sat in the parking lot, under the open sky, with Shiro voraciously working on his three— _three_ —hot fudge sundaes while Keith alternated bites of his vanilla cone with hot corn fritters.

“You’re gonna be sick tonight,” he commented as he popped the last corn fritter into his mouth and chased it with ice cream.

“Completely worth it,” Shiro sighed, eyes closed as he leaned back in his seat. Two empty plastic cups sat beside him, with the third extremely melted sundae sitting snugly in his lap. “It’s _so_ good. I didn’t think it could be—I mean, I remembered it, but it’s so much better in person.”

“Okay,” Keith snorted as he watched Shiro drink down the last dessert, his tongue working desperately to clean every trace of fudge from the sides of the cup. “Since your stomach’s already gonna be a mess, we might as well grab some greasy burgers and fries for later, too. C’mon, swap with me,” he said, already unbuckling.

“Why?”

“Because in about forty-five minutes, you’re gonna be doubled over in gastric distress. Let’s go. Time is ticking and I’m not letting you go to bed without eating something more substantial than three ice cream sundaes.”

 

—————

 

McDonald’s wasn’t exactly what Keith had planned to give Shiro for his homecoming, but maybe it was the right way to fall back into their rhythm.

There would be time for home cooked meals. Hunk had already consulted him about a menu for a get-together he wanted to host in honor of Shiro’s return— a six-course meal comprised of all of Shiro’s favorite foods. Keith had preemptively stocked cheap boxed macaroni in the pantry. He’d gotten six different flavors of soy ice cream, too, but it seemed that the ice cream from earlier hadn’t even bothered Shiro’s stomach.

Small mercies.

Keith planted a knee on the dark grey duvet covering the bed— a print of tiny white stars cascaded down the duvet cover, and a crescent moon hung in one corner. It had spent a year sitting in the linen closet while Keith slept on a bare mattress with just sheets for cover, neither needing anything more nor wanting to bother with it.

His loose flannel pants and Shiro’s old NASA summer camp shirt would keep him warm enough tonight. Too warm, probably, and any additional layers would ensure he’d be waking up in a sweat-puddle.

Shiro was already deep under the duvet, settled down so far that his feet dangled from the end of the bed. It was usually a close thing anyway, given how tall he was.

The blankets were pulled up so high that the slashed scar across his nose barely peeked out. Long lashes— and Shiro had the longest, thickest, _prettiest_ lashes Keith had ever noticed in his life— fanned elegantly over his cheeks, fluttering slightly as Shiro’s eyes moved rapidly underneath his lids, caught in some vivid dream. His not-quite-undercut was tousled and slightly fluffy from friction with the cheap cotton pillowcase. Strands as white as first snows and bleached bones stood stark against the rest of Shiro’s jet-black hair and the deep grey of the bedspread.

It wasn’t the Shiro he was used to seeing— time in the woods had changed him, outwards-in, as it would do to anyone. But it was still Shiro, and he looked peaceful at last.

Keith’s breath hitched in his chest, then stuttered out of his throat in stifled bursts. He felt something warm slip down his face well before he registered that they were tears. It felt unreal—like he had no control over his own body anymore at all, possessed by his own willful emotions. _Again_.

The harder he tried to reign his feelings back in, the wilder they grew— inexplicable, uncalled for, as intense as the first weeks after losing Shiro, which was something he’d scarcely thought possible. Something he’d hoped he was incapable of re-experiencing; a drought would be welcome after a year of storm and strife.

He curled forward, hunched on his side of the bed, hands digging into the star-patterned fabric as it grew dark where his tears fell.

“Whoa, whoa, hey,” Shiro said softly, the covers slipping down as he pushed himself up on an elbow. It was a little harder for him to maneuver himself without his prosthetic on, but he shifted and angled himself until he could sit up and draw Keith in. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Keith pushed hard against Shiro, meeting his open embrace with something fierce and rough, desperate for the reassurance of Shiro’s body. “I missed you,” Keith said into the juncture of Shiro’s neck and shoulder.

He was tempted to bite there, only just hard enough to break the skin, to feel Shiro between his teeth. One of his stranger impulses, but definitely not the worst. Keith nuzzled instead, and in between sobs he dragged his teeth over the cool skin that he ached to mark. He could taste the salt of his own tears on Shiro, slick and warm.

“I missed you,” Shiro echoed back, turning his head enough to press his cheek into Keith’s mussed hair. He let Keith crawl over him, straddling his hips.

Shiro _almost_ held him close enough to satisfy that visceral need for comfort.

“Harder,” Keith whispered, his nose buried against the delicate spot where Shiro’s jaw met his neck, just below his ear. He inhaled sharply as Shiro obliged, putting the thickly corded muscles of his left arm to use as he squeezed Keith against his front until no sliver of cold and empty space remained between them.

Until it was difficult to draw breath, and Keith felt Shiro between his thighs, against his chest, at his back— under his hands as he clenched his fingers and dug his nails into the older man’s firm flesh. Until he smelled and tasted Shiro, heard his wavering breaths, sensed the stir of his thoughts.

He cried against Shiro’s throat and was relieved that Shiro only held him tighter; he let Keith writhe his arms around him, clawing in his desperation to pull every piece of Shiro closer toward him.

“Shiro, I’m sorry,” he said, beyond caring that his voice broke weakly on the words, which were scarcely audible over the gentle hiss of the white noise from the sound machine that Shiro used to sleep.

The hospital had felt like another world unto itself—some sort of liminal space, foreign and cold, where Shiro was as liable to be taken from his grasp again as he was to be delivered back to reality. But they had escaped it together, and Keith’s worst fears had gone unrealized. Shiro hadn’t disappeared before him with the cruel irony of an old fairytale; neither had he awoken to find himself alone in a bed meant to be shared, victim of yet another wishful dream.

Shiro was home, in Keith’s arms where he belonged— safe, his again, and for good this time. They were out of the woods at last.

Finally— once his tears ran dry again and his breaths came slow and even—Keith relaxed. He was left with the slow movements of Shiro’s hand on his back, tracing circles along his spine and across the taut muscles of his shoulders.

“Ready to lie down?” Shiro asked.

Keith nodded against his shoulder, throat too raw and tongue too heavy to speak at all.

He ended up settling beside Shiro under the down-stuffed duvet, sweat be damned. Keith sighed— or grunted, more accurately— in satisfaction as Shiro tucked him under his chin. Shiro’s soft, slow heartbeat was the metronome he synced his breaths to.

Keith stretched out along the length of Shiro’s body, his toes pointing, back arching slightly under the back-and-forth strokes up and down his spine. Gradually, his nerves eased and a contented stupor worked from his foggy brain down to the tips of his fingers and toes.

Sleep found him wearing dried tears and a smile.

 

 


	2. Meadow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Shiro Bday!!! I've got a soft spot for all Shiros-- even ones who are actually shapeshifting void monsters.

 

Summer’s heat bled away over the next month and a half, as steady as the slow dwindle of daylight.

Shiro was up long before Keith ever woke; that much stayed true for all seasons. But these days, Keith wasn’t sure what his boyfriend did to occupy himself during those earliest morning hours when he still lay asleep.

Once, a year ago— a lifetime ago, it now felt— Shiro had kept a tight schedule, planned out in precise increments. It started with morning push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and maybe a run on the well-beaten trail that ran in a winding circuit through the nearby woods. His showers tended to be overlong by Keith’s standards— half an hour or more— and that was when Keith might finally be tugged from slumber, with the sound of Shiro’s muffled singing reaching even into his dreams.

Then Shiro would make their lunches and fix breakfast, just in time to ply a half-asleep Keith with something to eat. It was usually simple fare like eggs and toast, soup with re-heated salmon, or sometimes just fruit smoothies thickened with silky tofu. He’d do the dishes and tidy up, too, before he left early for the roundabout drive up to the observatory on Black Lion Mountain.

But now Shiro didn’t do any of those things.

Keith’s toes curled as his bare feet touched down onto the chilly floorboards. The nights now carried enough nip to warn that the first snows weren’t far off, and the mornings were brisk enough that Keith slipped on a hoodie before parting with the cozy warmth of their bed.

He wasn’t trying to be quiet as he padded into the kitchen, but he still managed to catch Shiro off-guard.

The older man sat at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee forgotten beside his outstretched hand as he stared out a window, perfectly still— almost serene.

“Shiro?” Keith asked, his voice still a sleepy morning croak.

It was almost like watching something finely tuned and mechanical whir to life— Shiro turned in his seat, blinking up at him, suddenly animated.

“Keith,” Shiro said, giving him a bright smile. “Good morning. I didn’t think you’d be up for another—” He paused to glance over at the digital display on the nearby microwave. “—hour or so.”

“Iverson has me clearing trails today,” Keith yawned. He tapped at Shiro’s coffee mug with the back of a finger, testing it. “Your coffee’s gone cold.”

“Oh.” Shiro picked up the cup and turned it in his hand, peering into the milky white, sugar-laden drink like it owed an explanation.

Keith plucked the mug out of Shiro’s hand as he passed and popped it into the microwave. “You’re welcome,” he muttered as he punched in the timer, still groggy from sleep.

“Thank you,” Shiro said as he turned and draped himself over the back of his chair, a pleased grin fixed in place.

The coffee was steaming when Keith returned it to its owner, and the mug itself scorched. It wasn’t enough to bother Keith—maybe due to the thick calluses he’d developed, or maybe because he’d grown up cooking on unforgiving campfires with little in the way of oven mitts—and he suspected Shiro would be grateful for the heat.

“Be careful,” he warned as he grabbed a slice of bread and sat down at the table. It was cheap white sandwich bread, like he’d grown up eating for every other meal of his early childhood. It was the best kind for grilled cheese and fried bologna sandwiches, which Keith could easily subsist on if left to his own devices.

Once, Shiro would have raked him over the coals for eating such a poor breakfast. He’d have foisted a boiled egg on him, at least, or quietly padded out Keith’s lunchbag with extra snacks and protein. He’d have kept the bread bin stocked with dark, whole-grain bread instead— the kind that cost nearly three times as much as Keith’s beloved Wonderbread.

Currently, Shiro sat idle. If he saw Keith’s meager breakfast, it didn’t concern him. The fingers of his prosthetic tapped away, and his gaze drifted again and again to the first rays of dawn as they crested the ridge of mountains, alighting on the trees around them.

“It’s a nice one,” Keith commented around a mouthful of soft bread.

“It’s beautiful,” Shiro said, soft as a whisper. “I could watch it for hours.”

Keith chewed and studied Shiro, who seemed ready to settle in and do just that.

“Is this what you do?” he ventured, glancing at Shiro’s contemplative profile as he reached over to dip the last corner of his bread in the other man’s sickeningly sweet coffee. “When I’m gone?”

Shiro’s head swiveled to him, dark eyes wide. He blinked, and swallowed, and then said, “Sometimes. I just… don’t want to take it for granted. You could say I have a new appreciation for everything, I guess.”

Keith smiled at that. “Well, I bet the view is even better from on top of Black Lion Mountain,” he suggested, “and I know Allura and Coran would love to have you back at the observatory. Whenever you’re feeling up to it.”

Shiro’s mouth opened for a full moment before slipping shut again. His newest smile was tired, a little strained at the edges. “Thanks. I know. And I want to get back, Keith.” There was more sincerity in his voice as he added, “I just like being here, with you. _Home_.”

Warmth fluttered in the depths of Keith’s chest. It was sweet. It was flattering. It was no doubt true. But Keith couldn’t help but worry that so much time alone was hurting Shiro in the long run.

“Hunk said he’d bring dinner by tonight if I did a few oil changes for him,” Keith said as he brushed off his hands and stood, “so be prepared for a delivery later.”

Shiro nodded. Though he tried to hide it behind a good-natured smile, disappointment was obvious as he asked, “Will you be home late?”

Keith sighed, his shoulders falling a fraction. “Yeah.” His hand went to his nape, palm ruffling through the grown-out hair. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be much later than seven or so,” he promised as he leaned down to kiss Shiro.

His lips brushed Shiro’s temple, then his cheekbone. Shiro’s hair was still damp and fragrant from his morning shower—floral and honeyed, thanks to his favorite shampoo bar, and Keith made sure to nose along his hairline and enjoy the familiar scent.

Shiro let him, laughing softly; he was breathless by the time he tipped his chin up and angled himself into Keith’s eager kiss.

His lips were cool, dry, and still tasted of over-sweet coffee.

Keith hummed under his breath, eyes shut in something bordering on domestic bliss. “I’ll be home as soon as I can, but Hunk’ll probably beat me here. Don’t invite him to stay for dinner this time,” Keith murmured as he pressed another kiss to Shiro’s lips, full-mouthed and lingering.

“Alright,” Shiro agreed, amusement evident in the lilt of the word. He turned thoughtful as he watched Keith withdraw and take a few reluctant steps back toward the bedroom, toward the shower and routine and the ranger uniform hung on the back of the desk chair. “I want to try getting the attic fan to work again. It’ll be my project for the day, okay?”

Keith nodded once, after a moment’s sincere consideration. “Okay. Just be careful going up and down that ladder.” He paused at the door to the bedroom, a stray observation hooking him like a sprung snare. “You’re not wearing your slippers?”

Shiro’s brows rose, followed by his gaze dropping to his own bare feet. “Oh. No. It didn’t feel cold enough for them, yet. But soon,” he added, casting a glance to the forest outside their cabin. 

Keith nearly said something then. The thermometer’s recent dip wasn’t why he asked, though it was true that October would soon bring the first light snows of fall— it was just something Shiro had always done.

But habits changed. People changed. _Shiro_ had changed, and perhaps a year of surviving on nothing at all had taken all of Shiro’s previous notions of comfort and broken them— and like a fracture in the bone, they’d healed differently. Perhaps neither frigid floorboards nor warm house slippers meant anything to a man who had endured unforgiving earth and merciless winter already.

 

—————

 

“Sorry for pulling you off the trail,” said the grizzled old ranger, "but I figured you ought to take a look, too.”

If he hadn’t known Iverson through the years— first as a frequent visitor and volunteer, then as a seasonal employee, and now as a permanent ranger— Keith might’ve been scared stiff by the head ranger’s scowl. 

His gloved fingers brushed over the trunk of the once-healthy pine, its bark crumbling like soft charcoal. Keith pushed further—curled his fingers into a crevice in the bark and clawed, his nose scrunching as the blackened wood easily gave way. Under the brittle outer char was soft heartwood that crumbled with rot and putrid sap.

“Never seen anything like it, myself,” Iverson said. The ex-Army man certainly had a way of falling into the clipped tones of a drill instructor, whether it suited the situation or not.

Keith flexed his fingers and examined his glove. A faint shimmer remained from the fine black dust, while the slimy sap left his fingers tacky. He got the sense the gloves were ruined. “Neither have I.”

Iverson nodded, a weathered hand drawn across the lower third of his face. “No one has. Got the university researchers stumped. Even the Holts didn’t know what to make of it. A dozen theories, of course, but no solid answers.”

Iverson toed at one of the gnarled roots that breeched the blanched soil; it, too, was cracked and scorched and flaked apart at a touch. 

“Makes no damn sense. The thing looks like it was torched, but not a thing near it is burned. And that sap… anyway, I know it’s not really in your wheelhouse, but I’d appreciate if you kept an eye out for more like it. No one sees as much of this park as you do.”

“I think Pidge would argue that Rover does,” Keith said. He peeled off his soiled glove, turned it inside out, and tucked it into his back pocket for later disposal.

“That lousy drone that knocked the satellite dish off of my cabin?” He grunted and folded his hands behind his back as they walked back to the beaten path, guided by bright marker flags. “I never thought I’d encounter someone smarter _or_ more of a nuisance than Matt Holt.”

Keith nodded and filed that comment away for Pidge. It was the sort of unintended praise she’d take with a cheeky grin.

“So… how’s Shirogane doing?”

Keith lost momentum for a moment and had to quicken to catch up to Iverson’s long, military-brisk strides. With arms crossed and his elbows held tight, Keith managed a few words. “He’s… fine. He’s—he’s okay.”

Iverson’s first response was a low rumble.

Keith went stiff when Iverson’s hand planted itself between his shoulder blades, firm and fatherly; a wave of something like déjà vu dampened the young ranger’s discomfort at the unanticipated contact. 

“It’s understandable if he isn’t yet,” his boss said, gruff tone softening by a degree. “I was just surprised to hear he hasn’t gone back to the observatory yet.”

Keith made a small noise, lost amid the ambient chatter of birds and rustling leaves. “It’s not really like him. But in a way it’s good,” Keith said. “I’d been worried that he’d throw himself back into work right away. I thought I’d end up having to pry him from his office. But… he barely seems interested in leaving the cabin anymore.”

“Can’t say I blame him,” Iverson sighed. 

There was a stretch of silence in which Keith felt himself being surveyed, seen through. He’d gotten that look a lot over the last year, and each time he could only think of how much he pitied any soldier who’d been stuck in Iverson’s command.

“Listen, Keith,” the old man began, his voice so heavy that it seemed to carry through to his feet, slowing his steps considerably. “I know this past year was difficult. And I realize I didn’t— I didn’t always make it easier on you.”

Keith saw Iverson wince, and his stomach twisted in kind. There had been grounds to fire him, he knew. Without Shiro, nothing held the same meaning— he had missed shifts, disappeared into the woods for weeks, been sighted on restricted trails and dangerous ravines, and spurned his superiors. He’d risked anything and everything during his daily searches, even if it meant heading for ruination. And when Iverson had eventually took Keith aside to tell him as much, and that Shiro was _gone_ —

Keith hadn’t taken it well.

“It’s okay,” he said, shaky.

“No. I should’ve given you more support,” Iverson said, shaking his head as he stared at some distant point along the forest floor. “You’re one of my people, Keith. And a good kid. Good kid with a hell of a right hook,” he muttered. “You needed help— professional help, the kind—”

“I’d never have gone to some doctor,” Keith interrupted, hands jammed into his pockets, “just to listen to them tell me to move on and forget about Shiro.”

Silence stretched again, and this time the woods around them seemed quieter.

“Probably not, no,” Iverson said. “Goddamn, talking to you makes me want a smoke,” he added.

Keith shot him a warning look, not quite serious. “That’s a two-hundred-fifty dollar fine—”

“I know the damn fine,” Iverson growled, but there was no bite behind it. “Just— _listen_. If you need anything, I want you to come to me about it. Tell me where your head’s at. Help me help you sort it out, alright?”

“Alright,” Keith repeated, if only to see Iverson relax.

“That goes for Shirogane, too,” Iverson said, that same heaviness returning. “He— you know, I used to lie awake and think about him. And you. And everything I should’ve done differently in those first hours. And now that he’s home— alive, against all odds, after _all that time…_ I think about it even more.”

Keith nodded, curling his lips in between his teeth for a moment. “I do, too.”

He followed Iverson’s gaze as the old man glanced back over his shoulder. 

A hundred yards behind them, at the end of a little yellow-flagged road, stood the gruesome pine. It was stark against the surrounding forest, even at this distance; it towered, dark and dead, its spindly upper branches cracking and crumbling at a stiff breeze, its silhouette withering away even as they watched.

Keith had to wonder how long it would last out here, at that rate— between the wind and rain, the whole thing might just disappear in a fortnight, as good as if it had never existed at all.

 

When Keith got home, the windows were open and the attic fan was running, drawing in cool air that swept the cabin in the fresh woodsy scent of pine and greenery. It was cold enough inside that he didn’t bother taking off his boots or his jacket at the door.

The newly repaired attic fan made a racket— all rushing air and the uneven rattle of aging parts coaxed into working— that made his footfalls faint to his own ears. 

Keith spied Shiro’s shadow first, stretched out across the dining area’s floorboards. Around the corner, by the fridge, he noticed its owner bent over the counter, elbows on the polished stone, his head cradled in his hands.

Keith’s smile broke at the same moment that his heart forced its way into his throat. “Got a headache?”

Shiro startled, the elbow of his prosthetic arm sending a half-filled glass toppling from the counter top. He was already wincing even before it shattered and sent shards of glass and fat drops of orange juice racing across the hardwood floor.

“Shit, don’t move,” Keith said as he turned and darted to the hall closet for a towel to lay across the sharp-edged pieces.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro said as gingerly stepped back from the mess, guilt written in the knit of his brow and the tight slope of his shoulders. “I didn’t—” 

The sight of his bare feet so near the glass shards had Keith on the verge of anxiety. He shook out the towel until it fluttered down across the kitchen floor, feeling a little like a man chivalrously covering a puddle in one of those old black-and-white movies. “No, Shiro, it’s not your fault. I didn’t mean to startle you. I should’ve knocked or something. The fan’s running pretty loud.”

“It’s not your fault, either,” Shiro said as he pressed closer to the kitchen cabinets while Keith stomped around, sweeping up all the large pieces of glass with the towel and the broom and the sides of his sturdy boots. “I keep whapping stuff with this arm.”

Keith was quiet while Shiro dampened a wad of paper towels and proceeded to help catch all the tinier bits of glass— things that were barely more than glimmers on the dark wood. He fetched a pair of slippers from the shoe-rack by the door, too, and brought them to a grateful Shiro as he finished drying his hands.

“Thank you,” the older man said as he toed them on, his hand braced on Keith’s shoulder for balance.

“Are you feeling okay?” Keith questioned softly. He ran his hand up Shiro’s extended arm, palmed over his shoulder, and then trailed down to the small of his back, drawing Shiro in closer. He was chilly from the outside air, and Keith decided it was well past time to close the windows and switch on the heat. “Is it a migraine? Should I call the neurologist?”

“No,” Shiro said quickly, his breath ghosting across the tip of Keith’s ear. “No, I’m fine.” 

Keith hummed low in his throat, uncertain. Unconvinced. He slid his hands up either side of the older man’s face, fingers raking gently over his temples and into short-cropped hair. “If you’re sure,” he reluctantly agreed.

“I am.” Shiro’s voice was tight, and so was his smile. “It was just my being distracted. I’m sorry, Keith.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said, rising up to press a kiss to Shiro’s jaw. Then his neck. Then the little dip of his clavicle.

He’d _missed_ this—someone to come home to after a long day, arms to fall into, the physical comfort of being held and holding someone in turn.

“I missed you,” he mumbled into Shiro’s chest, breath dampening the heather gray fabric.

“I missed you, too,” was the answer, paired with fingers gently raking through his overgrown hair. “I thought about you all the time out there,” he added—hesitantly, hanging onto every word like he was still considering whether to let it loose. “You kept me going.”

“You can remember that?”

“I know it,” Shiro said. “Memories or not.”

Neither of them wanted to break the embrace. Past Shiro’s shoulder, Keith caught sight of Hunk’s dinner— three stacked tupperware containers, each neatly labeled. His stomach growled at the sight of what looked like crispy rice and seasoned chicken, bright and yellow from the turmeric. There was a salad, too, and he wouldn’t be surprised if Shiro had already picked through it to eat his favorite bits.

“Hungry?” Shiro asked, smothering a short laugh into Keith’s hair.

“Yeah,” Keith said. It had been a long day, and he had curbed his hunger on fragments of snack bars and trail mix he’d found in his jacket pockets. He was tired and more than a little greasy from maintenance work— the automotive smell on his hair and skin had to be driving Shiro crazy.

Normally, he’d want nothing more than to inhale some dinner with Shiro and then scrub himself clean. Then they’d usually settle in on the couch, legs entwined— and Keith would find a hockey game or a nature documentary while Shiro scrolled along on his tablet, reading academic papers or catching up on social media.

But it wasn’t going to be a usual night.

“Hey… do you feel like stargazing?” was what Keith asked instead, ignoring the gurgling growls that begged him to start eating directly from Hunk’s tupperware.

He felt Shiro jerk in his arms, surprised again. “Yeah, sure. Yeah, I’d like that.”

Keith waited by the door, flashlight in hand, while his boyfriend zipped his coat and then traded his house slippers for a comfortable pair of hiking boots.

Shiro balanced carefully on one leg for each shoe, held steady by Keith all the while, and spent minutes fumbling with the laces before he finally straightened up.

“Do you want to look into some boots you don’t have to tie?” 

“ _Yes_. God, yes,” Shiro sighed as they stepped out onto the porch. “My fine motor skills are still a little hit and miss,” he added while frowning at his black and grey prosthetic. He tried pinching his thumb and his forefinger together and frowned when they didn’t quite meet. 

“We can shop around after your next appointment.” Keith turned on the lantern and lit their way down the front steps. “Are you, uh… pretty confident in those knots?”

Shiro looked down at his feet, chin tucked against his chest, a low hum hanging in his throat. “No,” he finally judged. “Not really. Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” Keith said, eyebrows raised. He set the lantern down on a step and knelt to redo Shiro’s laces. His boots were barely tightened at all, each single knot nearly unraveled already. “I’d rather not have you bust your ass out on the trail because you tripped over your own laces. Your luck is… kinda bad, Shiro.”

“Can’t be _that_ bad,” Shiro smiled as they headed into the woods, “if I somehow landed you.”

Shiro’s hand found his in the dark, larger fingers finding their way between his own. His thumbnail dragged along the inside of Keith’s wrist.

“ _Hah hah_. That’s sweet. But I’m not taking any more risks where you’re concerned.”

He held the lantern while they picked their way along the thin trail that ran up the foothill their cabin was situated on. Their land was outside of the park, but only just; it took less than fifteen minutes for Keith to get to work each day, if the weather was good and the visitor traffic was low.

They had to fall single file as the trail narrowed, tight with underbrush and jagged outcroppings of stone on either side. Keith kept a firm hold of Shiro’s hand, even when it meant for awkward maneuvering over obstacles on the trail.

A year without tending had left their usual stargazing spot overgrown. A slow pass with the lantern revealed that their orderly, rock-lined path had been swallowed up in reedy green.

Keith lifted his arms while wading through thigh-high grasses, frowning as he thought of the tick check they’d have to do once they got back home.

“You didn’t come out here at all?” Shiro asked. Their fingers were threaded still, and Shiro made a soft sound when Keith’s grip momentarily crushed his knuckles.

“Once,” Keith said, rubbing his thumb against Shiro’s hand in apology. “The week after they called the search. You were legally dead.”

“I think I still am, technically,” Shiro almost laughed. “Until they finish processing all of the paperwork.”

What little amusement Keith felt was more than matched by exasperation. Nothing in all of this had been easy, and even now a persistent tinge deep in his reptilian hindbrain— or somewhere as primal and paranoid— wouldn’t let him believe the ordeal was well and truly over. 

He kept that notion to himself as they reached the jut of rock that served as their place to view the nighttime skies. With a thick blanket spread out over the stone, it was actually pretty comfortable, if the mountain wind wasn’t too strong. Keith sat down, one leg bent and the other stretched out. Shiro preferred to be cross-legged, although he groaned considerably as he settled down and got comfortable.

“Getting old,” he said. 

“You’re twenty-nine, not geriatric,” Keith scoffed. A sharp inhalation followed, sadness as sharp as the nighttime breeze knifing through his ribcage. “Your birthday— we didn’t— _I_ didn’t do anything. You didn’t get to celebrate it yet.”

“Relax, Keith,” Shiro laughed, his arm sliding comfortingly around the smaller man’s shoulders. “I’m fine skipping it, to be honest. Next one’s the biggie. And yours is soon! Besides, I already got the best present I could’ve hoped for— being here with you.”

Keith smiled and inched himself closer, till their thighs were pressed together and he could rest his head on Shiro’s shoulder.

“It was the Perseids,” Keith said after an easy stretch of silence. “When I was last out here.”

He felt Shiro’s hum of approval more than he heard it. “Wow. Was it a good one?”

Had it been? Keith closed his eyes for a moment and placed himself back at this point, more than one year past.

Shiro was gone, then— weeks missing, and all around him Keith could feel others’ patience and understanding wearing thin. Time spent in the cabin was, by turns, depressing and utterly unbearable. The woods were the only place he found any solace at all, small and misshapen as it was.

“It was dark. No moon, tons of stars,” he recalled, gaze drifting up to the wan crescent that hung in the sky tonight. “And it was like, nonstop. Richest shower I think I ever saw. Sometimes there were four or five meteors at once.”

And he’d felt small, and alone, and mired in despair. He was too ashamed to add that he had wished on every falling star— until the sky went blurry and he’d bent to the ground, arms wound around his knees, and let himself cry until the ache in his throat quieted him.

“We missed this last one,” he added after a long lapse. Usually Shiro kept track of the heavens for him, his calendar attuned to every event worth watching.

“In our defense, we’ve been busy,” Shiro said, squeezing Keith tightly against him. His hand rubbed slow, gentle circles against Keith’s side. “We’ll catch the next one. And we’ve got the Orionids coming up. And the Geminids.”

“Yeah,” Keith breathed, eyes slipping shut again. 

It was a lot to look forward to. It was a worthy reminder that time had begun ticking forward again, and they could pick up where they’d left off— that five-year plan of Shiro’s might still work. Keith still needed to finish his degree, but the process of re-enrolling didn’t seem as daunting now. It’d be a lie to say the steady accumulation of missed years didn’t make him a little self-conscious in the classroom— first being held back in seventh grade, then working for a year after high school, and then withdrawing from classes before fall semester of his junior year because he could no longer balance school and work with his search for a boyfriend generally presumed dead.

Shiro’s own career was a different beast, and Keith propped his chin on the older man’s shoulder as he considered how much the vanished year would set back Shiro’s carefully laid plans and his chances of getting that NASA grant he’d been chasing. 

It would be hard, but had either of them ever known an easy life? Together they could surmount it, Keith knew. Shiro’s presence was like finding the horizon again, or a guiding star. It was certainty and surety, the reassurance of someone at his back in all things.

“Turning on some music,” Keith said as he fumbled for his phone in his jacket pocket. “Any requests?”

“Honky-tonk.”

“Denied, because I know you’re just making fun of me,” Keith muttered. “At least I don’t bop to club remixes of turn of the century hits.”

“It’s good exercise music. Oh, I like this song,” Shiro said as music began to spill from the tinny speakers of Keith’s battered phone.

“I know,” Keith answered wryly. He grinned as Shiro wound his fingers through Keith’s own, his prosthetic hand pressed to the small of his back. Shiro drew him in and rolled his shoulders to the music, as close to dancing as he could manage while seated on stony earth.

“Galaxy, galaxy,” Shiro sang along against Keith’s ear, making his hair raise as a tingle ran right down his spine, cold as springmelt.

Shiro’s voice was _beautiful._ Keith usually only heard it in the bathroom when he slipped in to brush his teeth while Shiro showered, or else when Shiro had more to drink than he could handle— a low threshold to break, surprisingly. Him crooning along to something on the radio while sober was a treat.

The first time Keith had heard Shiro’s singing voice was at Allura’s New Year’s Eve party years back. After getting drunk on an embarrassingly small amount of champagne, Shiro had belted out some truly lovely bars of Auld Lang Syne, initiated several minute-long hugs, over-shared, and then wound up sprawled across a desk. The videos still haunted him at the turn of every new year.

“What are you thinking about?” Shiro questioned as the song eventually faded into a new one— one of Keith’s favorites, all double bass notes and ripping drumbeats and faint rockabilly twang. His voice was warm and sultry against Keith’s ear.

He was thinking of Shiro at Allura’s party, drunk off of low-alcohol content secco and champagne, standing two feet from Keith as he repeatedly asked Matt whether or not he thought Keith liked him. At normal conversational volume. 

“One of my favorite memories of you,” Keith said, a challenge set in his wry smile.

It only took Shiro six tries to guess it.

 

—————

 

Keith checked fire lines all morning, deep in a less-trekked stretch of mountainside forest.

The weather continued to turn in the face of autumn’s advance. The forest’s green bled into gold, amber, deep reds. Mornings brought frost along the edges of the windows, the leaves, his pickup’s windshield.

He stumbled across bones at one point, deep into a valley trail, where towering trees blotted the sky like blooming overgrowth across a lake. Crouched beside the skeletal remains, Keith was able to discern that they weren’t human by any stretch; what they _were_ was harder to say. Size alone suggested an elk or something similar, but their exact shape was unlike anything he’d ever seen.

The rotted flesh still clinging at joints suggested the remains were fairly recent. The bones themselves hadn’t yet bleached, but remained grey and _wet_. Shiny, like they’d only just been picked clean. Like if he reached out and touched it, he’d find the surface saliva-slick.

Keith snapped a few pictures, sinking low to get clear shots of the wicked-looking growths that jutted out along what might’ve been a femur. If it was a deformity, Keith was surprised the animal had lived long enough to grow so large— a ton, at least; if it was some terrible sort of bone cancer, he pitied the thing that had endured it.

There was no cell reception here, same as most of the park, but he tried texting a few pictures to Hunk and Pidge anyway. They failed to send, and Keith pocketed the phone again with a resigned sigh.

Throughout the day, he found there were more trees like the one Iverson had shown him.

Two, exactly.

The first was an aspen near Nalquod Creek. Its leaves ought to have been brilliant gold, its bark white. Instead, its trunk was dark as pitch, bark peeling in paper-thin wisps that reminded Keith of burned paper. From a distance, its leaves looked like crows’ feathers, alive as the wind ruffled through them; up close they were dull and dark, crumbling, closer to ash than anything else.

The other was a young western larch. Like the aspen, its needles should’ve been yellowing in preparation for winter— like its surrounding elders, their sweeping branches all limned in gold. But it was a pitiful thing, its brittle needles curled and broken, the color leeched out of it and replaced with that of char. Black sap wept down its withered trunk, slow and sickly.

Keith took pictures and noted both on his map, then sketched them out in his latest pocket sketchbook, careful to include every relevant detail.

He took his lunch on a fallen tree beside the creek. Two weeks of near-constant ham sandwiches were starting to wear on him, but they were the quickest thing to slap together before he left in the morning. He’d have to branch out into peanut butter soon. Maybe even step outside of sandwich territory entirely.

A string of apologetic texts paved the way for his unexpectedly late arrival, and by the time Keith actually got home, it was closer to midnight than he’d have hoped.

The dark inside the cabin was interrupted only by the occasional glow of an appliance. The roomba sat quietly in its dock, and there was only the faint hum of white noise from the bedroom. Clutter lined the kitchen counters, and the sink was stacked with soaking dishes that Shiro had opted not to wash; Keith opted for the same, tossing his coat and keys onto the dining room table and ignoring the waiting mess for now. 

As Keith crossed the bedroom’s threshold, he stilled— just half a heartbeat, as his eyes fell on the shape stretched underneath the duvet and the dark silhouette against the pillow. The sight of someone already curled in his bed sent his adrenaline racing and cooled his blood to an icy standstill, but the horror surged and fell in the span of a heartbeat.

Because it was Shiro. Just Shiro, of course, exactly where he was supposed to be. Keith blamed his reaction on too many months of coming home to an empty bed. No matter how much he hated it— that whole year, which now felt as removed from reality as he had while living it— there was no denying that it plagued him still.

He stripped down to his underwear, decided not to bother with actual pajamas, and slid in beside the man who already claimed half the bed. After a minute or so of staring at the beams across the ceiling and listening to the wash of sound from the machine on Shiro’s nightstand, it was lights out.

And then it wasn’t. 

Keith awoke with one thought, solid in his mind even while he had yet to gather up his waking consciousness. _Where’s Shiro?_

It roused him from deep slumber, drawing him out of that still, warm darkness as though he’d been hooked and reeled in, up and up. The question bounced around in his skull like it had for months on end, only this time with a heavy sense of dissatisfaction attached, and an answer, too: _Right here. Home._

It gnawed at the edges of his mind, left him wondering in the dark of their unlit bedroom, eyes struggling to stay open more than a half-second, his grasp on consciousness still tenuous at best. Keith tried rolling over, and kicking, and stretching out his legs and curling his toes until his calves threatened to spasm.

That was when he caught sight of the shape looming across the room, darkening the doorway.

It was Shiro’s shape, Shiro’s silhouette, that stood stock-still. It was the same breadth of him, just darker than even the deepest shadows that pooled in the corners of their small cabin bedroom— like a void cut into the shape of a man. 

“Shiro?” Keith whispered, still caught in the haze of fresh sleep and half-afraid that his voice would fail him.

The room tilted slightly as Shiro turned, still carved in shadow, and moved back to the bed with an easy glide and silent footsteps.

“Keith, go back to sleep,” his voice soothed as his familiar weight settled back down beside him.

Keith recoiled at first, just an inch, but then Shiro’s arm was looped around him, the wide span of his hand running down Keith’s spine in a manner that felt so right. He blinked, and Shiro was Shiro again, whatever trick of sleep and shadow that had made him seem so formless and dark overcome.

Still…

Keith reached out and smushed his hand across Shiro’s face, heedless of the muffled sound of surprise his boyfriend made. He palmed skin that was both smooth and scarred, gently stroked his thumb over thick eyebrows, pinched his nose while Shiro wheezed out a laugh.

“What are you doing?”

“Just checking,” Keith yawned, satisfied. “Is everything okay?” He asked as he was pulled close, shuddering softly as Shiro let the cold in under their covers. His strong chin was nestled in Keith’s hair, heavy breaths ruffling at the sleep-mussed tufts near his crown.

“Fine,” Shiro murmured, his embrace tightening. “Sorry for waking you.”

“I’m gonna feel it at two in the afternoon,” Keith grumbled. He twisted and wriggled until he felt comfortable again, tucked close to Shiro, his cheek pressed against the firm swell of the older man’s chest, cool and welcome as a fresh pillow.

He breathed in deep, contentedly, and counted on the steady, slow beat of Shiro’s sleep-time heartbeat to drag him back under.

Keith’s brow furrowed and he turned his head. _Weird,_ his sleepy mind whispered _._ He pressed his ear flat against Shiro’s skin, shifting in search of a sound he had never before struggled to find. His own heartbeat had quickened considerably by the time he finally caught it— a sudden beat, strong and familiar, impressively low in its resting rate.

Dull relief washed through him, rolling back the brief panic that had threatened to fully wrench him from slumber. Keith relaxed in Shiro’s hold, but through the haze of sleep he had to wonder why his heartbeat had been a struggle to find at all. He listened, his breaths falling into sync with the tempo of Shiro’s heart— with Shiro’s sound machine playing a babble of white noise quietly in the background, a gentle static that filled the dark around them— and his eyes tightly shut.

 

—————

 

It all returned to Keith like a half-remembered dream come morning, hovering disjointedly at the edge of his consciousness. For some time, he sat in the empty bed and tried to sift through what he could recall— and the unsettled emotions that accompanied the hazy memories.

The sound of running water and clinking dishes that came faintly from the kitchen eventually tugged Keith out of the bed, to the bathroom, and then plodding into the kitchen. Rounding the corner, he found his boyfriend at the sink, broad shoulders bent as he washed the leftover dishes from the night before.

“Shiro,” he sighed, unable to keep a note of fond exasperation out of the name. If Shiro’d let them alone a little longer, Keith would’ve taken care of it. “Shiro,” he repeated, uncrossing his arms as he straightened out of his lean against the refrigerator.

Shiro didn’t move, except to stack another wet dish in the drying rack beside the sink.

Keith watched for another minute, chewing on his lip. Shiro’s form had grown a little broader in the last year and some months, a little thicker with muscle, and the way his back moved under the taut fabric of an old undershirt was nearly hypnotic. Whatever had happened out there had added to Shiro as much as it had taken away. 

He felt heavier now when Keith held him— and colder, and stiller.

“Shiro,” he said, making his way closer, concern building in him at the lack of response. Shiro was distracted—preoccupied, maybe, lost in his thoughts and a familiar rote task—and Keith neither wanted to leave him alone with those thoughts nor startle him into a panic.

He hesitated, palm hovering inches from Shiro’s shoulder. This close, Keith could see the goosebumps raised along the skin of Shiro’s nape.

“Shiro?” 

That finally got his attention, sharp and sudden.

Keith drew back a hair, all instinct, when Shiro turned on him.

“You’re cold,” Keith said, barely containing the snap to his words. On a hunch, he leaned in and reached past Shiro to stick his hand under the faucet. “What the fuck,” he muttered as he flicked the icy water from his hands and turned the handle off. “You didn’t even have warm water going?”

“I… didn’t notice,” Shiro said, wide-eyed as he stared down at the faucet. The pause was too long and they both felt it.

Keith watched Shiro brace himself against the counter before managing to look him in the eye. His hand was white-knuckled, and Keith wasn’t sure whether it was from the near-freezing well-water or his vise-fingered grip on the edge of the sink.

Another long silence settled in. “Do I need to call the doctor?”

“No,” Shiro said, his voice overlapping Keith’s. “The pilot light probably went out halfway through and I just—I didn’t notice it. Look, I’ll check it--”

“ _I’ll_ check it,” Keith rebutted, a spread hand pressed into Shiro’s chest to keep him in place.

“Keith.”

“You _hate_ lighting it,” Keith said over his shoulder as he went to check the water heater. “Remember?”

The pilot wasn’t out.

Keith didn’t bother saying so. Neither of them had bought that excuse in the first place, really. Instead he hounded after Shiro, poking his head through each doorway until he found the man digging through the dryer in the laundry room.

“It’s warm,” Shiro explained as he pulled a worn sweater—still fuzzy with static and smelling of fresh laundry— over his head.

“And you’re _freezing_ ,” Keith noted as he stepped close and cupped Shiro’s face in both hands.

The dryer-warm sweater did nothing for the chill skin along Shiro’s jaw and throat, his frosty lips. But Keith’s touch did. Shiro leaned into his hands, sighing as he leeched warmth from Keith’s rough palms.

Shiro’s icy fingers crept under his shirt, up Keith’s back— slow at first, and then eager in their advance. Their bone-deep cold seemed that much more severe against Keith’s skin, so quick to wick away his heat.

He must’ve made a noise indicating as much.

“Sorry,” Shiro said, his hand slowly retreating.

Keith caught him by the wrist and held him fast. “It’s ok. I’m used to being your space heater,” he said. Arm bent awkwardly behind him, he guided Shiro’s hand back up his shirt, settling it somewhere over his ribs. “I’m just not used to you being this cold. I’m… worried about you.”

“I don’t want you to worry.”

“I know,” Keith said, and his annoyance was clear even as he gently rocked against Shiro, arms looping around his neck, enveloping the larger man’s figure as best he could. “That’s why you never _tell me_ anything.”

Shiro had the good grace to look guilty, at least.

“I know you don’t want to burden anyone or whatever, but that’s not… I _want_ to help, Shiro. I want you to trust me to help you,” Keith said. He fixed on a magenta spot on Shiro’s sweater, not wanting to see whatever sad expression his boyfriend now wore. He thought he recognized the stain as gooseberry jam from an attempt at crepes gone horribly awry; that had been two years ago, and yet the mark remained.

He could feel Shiro nuzzle into the crown of his head, maybe leaving a kiss.

“You know I love you,” Shiro said softly above him, in _that_ voice, and Keith sighed even as he melted against the other man’s front.

He didn't know what to make of it— of Shiro's... cold, whatever it was, or the seam between them that had widened to something more like a fracture. 

Their bond was still strong. Keith could feel that much when he saw Shiro, or held him, or texted him during lulls in the workday. But it was different now, like there was old ground that needed to be retreaded. 

Like Shiro was wrestling with something alone; like maybe he had remembered something from his year missing and didn’t want to breathe a word of it.

Keith didn’t want to think about it. If Shiro didn’t want him knowing, then it was bad. _Awful_ , if Shiro’s preoccupation was anything to judge by. It had to be something that Shiro knew he’d spit blood over, and Keith wasn’t sure which was worse— hearing the grisly details, or being left to imagine them.

It left him breathing hard through his nose, hands clenched, eaten up inside with frustration and that too-familiar feeling of uselessness. Whatever was bothering Shiro bothered him, too, secondhand. Navigating the narrow grounds between taking care of his boyfriend and respecting his privacy had never been especially easy with Shiro, with his penchant for bottling up anything and everything, but lately…

Keith spent his day off doing everything he could to keep both his hands and mind busy— working on his truck and Shiro’s jeep and the hover racer, re-caulking the tub, cleaning and sharpening his hunting knives, working out alongside Shiro. 

A full day’s exertion left him physically exhausted, but his thoughts still turned and spun as they had all day. His internal turmoil was apparent enough that Shiro cornered him in the bathroom, leaning in front of the door to keep him from darting back out to find something to fix, and asked what was wrong.

“Nothing,” Keith said, glancing to the side to avoid the level, no-nonsense gaze he knew Shiro was studying him with. “I’m fine. Just… busy today.”

“Right. Busy,” Shiro said. He cupped Keith’s face, his thumb stroking up the bridge of his nose to the space between his brows, up and down, smoothing out a furrow Keith hadn’t realized was there. “Stressing because of me, huh?”

“No.”

“You are. You _always_ do.” Shiro sighed, but it was loving, as was the way he cradled Keith’s head and slid his fingers through the long hair at his nape. “But don’t, okay? I’m working things out. Slowly. Uh, very slowly,” he added with a note of sheepishness.

“No,” Keith repeated, his forehead thumping against Shiro’s chest. “You’re doing fine.”

He breathed easier after that. A long shower (though still short by Shiro’s standards) helped him decompress further, and by bedtime Keith was crawling into bed with his eyes already shut.

He hadn’t expected to wake in the middle of the night again.

Twice in a week was unusual. _At all_ was unusual. Unlike Shiro, it was easy for Keith to drop off and sleep solidly through the night; his biological clock ran regular, too, and it took more than the thump of a tree branch or a shift of the mattress to wake him.

The sound machine on Shiro’s nightstand droned on as his consciousness slowly rolled in like the tide. The dark shapes and shadows of the bedroom stayed put, and the doorway was clear, and Keith rolled over to wedge himself against Shiro again—

And found himself alone.

"Shiro?" Keith asked. There was no time to even tamp down on the panic that threatened to seal his throat. “Shiro?"

His heart rang louder in his ears than the looped static of the white noise as he threw the covers aside and darted to the bathroom, his narrow fingers gripping the doorframe tight. “Shiro?”

The living room was empty, and the kitchen, and the laundry, too. Keith turned on every light as he went from room to room, searching even the attic and closets. He half-wondered if it was a nightmare, but the rancid taste of bile hovering at the back of his throat seemed too real. 

Icy water from the kitchen faucet braced him for a few moments. He stood hunched over the sink and stared unfocused at the drain as water dripped from his nose and lips and the tips of his shaggy hair. His chest heaved with deep breaths that nonetheless left him light-headed, and Keith waited for the nervous wave of nausea to pass.

 _Not a dream._ His hands tightened, curling to fists, his short nails scraping uselessly over the sleek and polished stone of the countertop.

It took less than a minute for Keith to throw on a shirt and a coat and jam his feet into a pair of boots. His pack still sat in the living room, on a table they rarely used or tidied; it was still packed with rations, a radio, and everything else he’d needed during stints spent searching the woods.

He hadn’t thought to check a clock before he headed out the door, but going by the moon and the stars, Keith figured it couldn’t be later than two.

A quick pass with his flashlight revealed Shiro’s Jeep still parked under the port, the light glinting coldly off of the windshield. He scanned the open area around the cabin next, and then swung the flashlight’s beam back and forth across the tree line.

“Shiro!” His voice sounded small in the cold night air, swallowed up by the wind and the sound of a mountainside’s worth of brittle branches and leaves rattling together. Keith had felt worse cold before, certainly, but it still stung his eyes and sapped the air from his lungs. It left him shaking, his vision narrowed and the light unsteady in his hand as he tried to find tracks to follow.

His mind made terrible leaps, as if it had been waiting for this moment to regurgitate every idle fear of losing Shiro he’d ever entertained. Horrid fantasies came first—that the stories were true, and the Witch of the Woods had taken him. He was under a spell, drawn from home like the victim in a fairytale, possessed and endangered. He was spirited away like folk stories talked about, dragged to another world without leaving a trace behind.

Keith licked his lips, gaze roving along the ground in search of _anything_ , any sign of Shiro at all. 

“Shiro!” Already he felt hoarse, but even as he stepped into the woods proper he kept his call. There was no trail to follow; he proceeded blind, guided by gut feeling and a senseless hope that the universe might be kind this time. 

It was deep night, with only a sliver of moon to see by and an expanse of dark woods waiting to swallow the both of them up. Shiro hadn’t taken any of the flashlights or lanterns with him, and his coat had still hung near the door; he hadn’t taken his phone, which still sat plugged in on the nightstand.

That rattled Keith the worst, more insidiously than any grim fantasy. Years of his father’s cautions and his own work on the trails made him well-acquainted with human tragedy. Keith had never seen compelling evidence of woods witches or monsters, but he had seen the corpses of hikers lost in blinding snow, starving, hypothermic. He’d tracked unfortunate hikers who had, desperate and frightened, lost their senses and trudged into the wilderness undressed and ill-prepared.

Keith couldn’t bear to think of the same happening to Shiro— wandering outside in a haze, not himself, not in his right senses, already lost before he stepped foot into the woods. The unthinkable hung somewhere behind all of that, unbidden; people who went into the woods with no intent of return were usually found years later, after snow melts and brush clearing.

These woods, long familiar, seemed strange now. His own panic and the heavy shroud of darkness made well-worn paths feel new and wild and dangerous; it was likely just his surefootedness and the almost-muscle memory he had for the land that kept him from stumbling as he darted up the hillside path, over tree roots and through the grasping snares of low shrubs.

“Shiro! Shiro. Shiro, Shiro,” Keith called in between deep inhalations, so many times that the name eventually ran together, his voice wavering with each bounding step he took. “Takashi, _please_ \--”

“Keith?”

It was déjà vu of the worst kind, mired in the mixed emotions of relief and terror—a gut sensation that rooted Keith to the spot so quickly and surely that he nearly tipped forward on momentum alone.

He saw a faint shock of white catch the wan moonlight further up the hill. From a dense thicket, Shiro emerged out of the fog of shadows, hand braced on the broad trunk of a looming fir, the moonlight catching on his eyes and the metal of his arm. It struck Keith as an ugly replay of the night two months past—a cruel mirroring of the last time he lost Shiro to this forest, briefer but just as crushing a blow. 

"Shiro," Keith cried, surprised at just how feeble his voice was. The wind stung his cheeks harder, punishing him for allowing tears to leave wet tracks down his face.

"Keith?" His name seemed to roll down the hill, the voice carrying it surprised but not upset—not upset like Keith was, at least. A little angry, and a little frightened, but far from shaken to the marrow of his bones. "Keith, what are you doing out here? It’s not safe—“

"Shiro, you were _gone_ ," Keith said through teeth clenched either from cold or restrained emotion. His bare hands curled into tight fists as he waited on Shiro’s descent. "Again. You _left_ me—“

"I'm right here.” Shiro took him by the shoulders, his touch firm and real, and pulled him close.

It was so good that Keith couldn’t speak. Shiro was warm against the night’s chill, despite wearing only the same shirt and flannel pants he’d worn to bed, and his embrace was every sort of comfort that Keith ever craved. He closed his eyes and leaned forward, all of his weight settling in on the balls of his feet; his hands twisted in the fabric of Shiro’s faded NASA tee in a desperate attempt to draw him even closer than full-flush.

Shiro’s skin smelled like electricity—like the crackle of ozone left in the air after a nearby lightning strike. It raised the fine hairs all over Keith’s arms and neck, taut and goosepimpled, as if some of the charge Shiro carried had passed to him.

“Where did you go?” he asked while Shiro stroked up and down his nape, calming Keith’s raised hackles. His warm thumb occasionally ran up the side of Keith’s tense jaw to trace the cold shell of one ear. “Why are you out here?”

Shiro kept him hooked with his prosthetic arm, snug around his waist, his hold so firm that Keith barely needed to support himself. Seconds passed and he began to sway, rocking Keith back and forth to a gentle tempo. “Taking a walk. I wanted to see the stars again.”

"The stars,” Keith muttered bitterly. He squeezed his eyes shut as a fresh wave of tears followed, and he wiped his runny nose against Shiro’s shoulder, at least a little out of spite. When he swallowed, it was thick enough that he nearly choked. “You could've told me.”

The woods around them were silent. Blankly silent, as if a vacuum existed around them. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“You shouldn’t have left me,” Keith said, though it ought to have been a given.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro said, and a drawn silence followed in place of a promise never to do the same.

“Don’t do it again.” It wasn’t meant to be begging. He trembled hard, grateful suddenly for the way the taller man was propping him up. “Please, Shiro."

The early October chill wasn't nothing, even for someone as hot-blooded as Keith. Without the fear of losing Shiro spurring him forward, he had time to realize that his thin pajama pants and twill jacket weren't much against the cold fall winds. He’d forsaken socks and gloves, and beneath his jacket was just a faded red henley with holes along the seams under his arms.

 "Keith." Shiro took in the state of him with a heavy look— affectionate, grievously concerned, and chased with a twinge of what looked like pain. "Let's get you home."

 

_—————_

 

 _(10:12) Lance:_ Did he say why?? Maybe he’s going stir-crazy in there

 _(10:12) Lance:_ Cabin fever and all

 

Keith stared at the bright bubbles of text. He let his phone tip to the side and thump facedown onto the tabletop.

Maybe telling someone had been a mistake. Or maybe telling _Lance_ had been a mistake. But Allura was back in London for some gala her cousin was throwing, and Pidge and Hunk were both studying for the same biochem test… 

And Lance was always the quickest to reply. Fortunately, he was also— for reasons Keith still couldn’t pin down— ten times easier to deal with through text. Or email. Or anything that didn’t involve speaking face-to-face.

 

 _(10:15)_ just wanted to look at the stars for a while, he said

 _(10:16)_ he said he never woke me up when he went out to jog so he didn’t think he needed to bother me for a “little walk”

 _(10:16)_ his words

 

He’d been too angry to say anything to Shiro this morning, and too wracked with relief to say anything the night before, as they’d fallen back into bed.

Shiro seemed to have interpreted Keith’s quiet as him needing space. He’d taken the grocery list and left for the store early, looking hangdog the whole time. Keith hadn’t let him go without a hug, despite still burning with questions and hurt. It was too risky _not_ to, given that he couldn’t escape the fear that he was bound to lose Shiro again— like the universe was fucking conspiring to take him. Like he was already drifting away.

 

 _(10:16) Lance:_ In just his pajamas tho? And barefoot, wtf

 

Keith mashed the screen as he typed out his reply.

 _(10:18)_ I couldn’t believe it

 _(10:18)_ I thought I was gonna find him dead

 _(10:18)_ Or not at all…

 _(10:19)_ I just don’t understand why he’d leave me in the dark like that

 

 _(10:20) Lance:_ Hunk always says the biggest issue you two have is communication

 _(10:20) Lance:_ It’s like the only drama you guys ever have

 

Keith frowned. Drama seemed like a strong word for it. If he and Shiro sometimes danced around the uncomfortable, it was out of concern and affection for each other, out of an unwillingness to risk stepping on toes or asking too much of a relationship that at times felt too good to last.

For the most part, it all came naturally. They meshed well and bickered little. Their stubborn streaks usually aligned. They both liked the quiet, the solitude, the simple comforts. They shared more with each other than either of them ever had with anyone else; they _knew_ each other better than anyone else. Keith could count the number of times they’d seriously argued on one hand, which seemed some kind of victory. But he couldn’t number all the times he and Shiro both had smiled to each other and insisted nothing was amiss, and he was less certain of how to score that.

 _(10:22)_ Shiro’s worse about it tho

_(10:22) Lance:_ Yeah true

 _(10:22) Lance:_ You at least pop your top every now and then

 _(10:22) Lance:_ And you can’t lie for shit and you make that dumb face whenever you’re upset

 _(10:23) Lance:_ Red flags everywhere

 _(10:23) Lance:_ But Shiro… he’s got that cool, heroic sort of stoicism going on…

 _(10:23) Lance:_ Strong and mysterious…

 

 _(10:23)_ Really not the time lance

 _(10:24)_ He gets upset anytime I mention calling his doctors and says he’s fine

 _(10:24)_ He doesn’t want to go to the hospital again and I don’t blame him but…

 _(10:24)_ I don’t want to give him any shit bc he’s been through enough of it. But I don’t know what to do for him, idk what he needs. I just want him to be safe…

 

 _(10:26) Lance:_ Well.

 _(10:26) Lance:_ You’re kind of the Shiro expert here, honestly.

 

 _(10:27)_ I don’t feel like it lately…

 _(10:30)_ I want ur advice

 

 _(10:30) Lance:_ You want?? My advice???

 _(10:30) Lance:_ Sec, screenshotting this

 

 _(10:33)_ Ass.

Keith took the extra time to thumb through and add a donkey emoji, too.

 

 _(10:35) Lance:_ Seriously though, maybe he did just wanted to get away for a little bit, clear his head?

 _(10:36) Lance:_ Anxiety at like 2 am isn’t fun man. If he felt like he needed to get out and just B R E A T H E… I’d totally get that you know? And I’d get not wanting to be upfront about the reason either

 _(10:36) Lance:_ During finals week i would’ve been out there next to him lmao

 _(10:36) Lance:_ I’m not saying it’s smart or rational or that he didn’t do it in a shitty way. Obv something’s up and I get why it freaked you out, esp after… yknow

 _(10:37) Lance:_ You just need to talk to each other. Ask him what’s going on and don’t let him give you a bogus answer. Make sure he knows why it upset you and lay out some ground rules

 _(10:38) Lance:_ Don’t chicken out, I know you get weirdly paranoid about relationship stuff bc of ur family and everything but Shiro’s not going anywhere

 _(10:38) Lance:_ Barring like, alien abduction or somth

 _(10:38) Lance:_ And listen, if anyone can crack that handsome, steely facade it’s u

 

Keith read through every text— some of them twice— and then sighed.

 _(10:40)_ Thanks lance

 

Another text bubble popped up, an ellipsis signaling there was more to come. Keith waited patiently— Lance could be a surprisingly competent voice of reason when he wanted to.

 _(10:41) Lance:_ Orrrr if that doesn’t work

 _(10:42) Lance: S_ ee if he’s into being tied to the bed maybe? Fun AND effective

 

 _(10:42)_ I SAID THANKS LANCE

 

It was another forty minutes before Shiro returned, and Keith spent it in the mid-morning light, practicing his hatchet and knife throwing.

His father had given him his first knife at seven, and he’d messily skinned his first hare right after. The gift had been purely practical, as had his father’s gentle instructions on how to hold the blade, and throw it, and clean it; it was Keith who first made it into a game, when his father wasn’t around to chide him for risking a quality knife.

Without rattlesnakes and black-shelled scorpions to pin, Keith happily settled for a simple, handmade target board. He liked the weight of a well-worn handle against his palm, the satisfying thwack of the blade edge burying itself deep in a slab of painted wood. Handling blades had come to him more easily than shooting did, and even now he much preferred the feel of an axe or a dagger to a handgun or rifle.

Keith kept throwing as Shiro’s Jeep pulled in behind him, and ignored the crunch of leaf-strewn gravel as he took the groceries inside. He was still going when Shiro emerged from the house with a coffee in hand, sipping it as he watched from the safe distance of the porch.

“Can I try?” he asked as Keith walked up to the target to wrench three small hatchets and a hunting dagger from the pock-marked wood.

“Yeah,” Keith said, his surprise flaring and fading quick. Shiro liked hand-to-hand, but that was about it. He pushed sweat-damp hair back from his forehead and beckoned his boyfriend closer. “Of course. Come here.”

He gripped the hatchet by the metal head as he guided the worn-smooth handle into Shiro’s waiting hand. It was fortunate that Shiro had always been a lefty, he thought.

“Your grip’s too high,” Keith said, fingers curled against his lip as he considered Shiro’s stance next. “And put your feet like this,” he added, stepping in to correct Shiro’s position with gentle tugs and taps. “Now, when you throw it, you want to get just enough spin.”

“How do I know what’s just enough?”

“Um,” Keith stalled, mouth tightening into a frown. “You… you just feel it? I guess—I guess it’s like…”

“I’m sorry. I know you just have an instinct for stuff like this,” Shiro said as he fondly nudged Keith’s side. “I guess all I can do is try.”

Shiro’s first attempt went sailing clear past the target and into the woods, where it thudded repeatedly as it rolled through roots and underbrush. He winced.

“It’s ok. You can’t expect to nail _everything_ on your first try.”

Shiro’s sudden, sheepish smile caught between them, and he laughed in agreement. “I suppose not.” 

His next throw clipped the edge of the wooden target, taking out a hefty chunk of pine.

Keith couldn’t help but flinch at the sound of it. Shiro’s precision might not be all there, but the power he was able to put behind his throws was nothing to scoff at.

He was ready to say as much when a peripheral glimpse of Shiro raised the hair along his nape, up his forearms. His grey eyes were keen on the target, his soft smile was gone, replaced with a look that was as sharp as the axe he held in hand.

“Hey, Keith,” he said, his focus shifting to the red and silver steel of the hatchet. “While I was driving, I got to thinking, and I wanted to talk about last night. This morning, technically, I guess. You know I didn’t mean to worry you, right? I didn’t think you’d even notice. You were totally wiped out, I thought, so… So, I’m sorry. I just don’t know how many times I need to apologize to—”

“You don’t have to keep apologizing,” Keith said. He bit his lip after, because he hadn’t meant to cut Shiro off— and now he stood there, hatchet loose in his left hand, looking at Keith with expectation. The ranger crossed his arms and widened his stance a little; it was done before he even realized he was doing it. “Just promise me you won’t do it again. It’s that simple.”

Shiro’s mouth opened, saying nothing, and then shut again. He fidgeted, the hand holding the axe never quite still. “Keith,” he breathed, shaking his head slightly, expression tightening with tension. “I… I want to make it up to you—”

“That’s easy,” Keith interrupted again, feeling the faintest taste of something metallic at the back of his throat. It tickled like a brush of acid, hinting that something more caustic was to follow. “Don’t risk your life again.”

“I _didn’t_ —”

“Don’t give me a heart attack wondering where you are, trying to find you. Don’t make me go through that _again_. Don’t abandon me. Don’t go looking for danger in your fucking _PJs_ —”

“I _wasn’t_.”

“Then why were you out there?” Keith asked, stomping closer. Something in his gut stopped him short, and Keith’s gaze darted to the axe still held in Shiro’s curled fingers, the grip so tight his knuckles had blanched; he swallowed and closed the rest of the gap, angry at himself for hesitating. 

“And why can’t you just let it go? Tell me something, Shiro. Please. Or— or just say you’re sorry and you won’t go stalking out there at midnight again.”

The heavy silence wasn’t like Shiro, and neither was the way he stared past Keith, past the cabin, at some far point on the other side of the neighboring mountain. 

Keith glanced back over his shoulder and followed Shiro’s gaze, north and west, a hundred miles off. He was close enough to feel Shiro’s breaths and smell the camellia and elderflower from his favorite soap and shampoo. The fragrant, solid warmth of Shiro’s body was mere inches away, and Keith was sorely tempted to fall against it— to surrender to what felt best, and hope that simply having each other could set all things right.

“I don’t know how to explain it to you, Keith,” Shiro said, voice quiet and graveled, “but I need to do this. It’s… it’s important to me. Absolutely. I can’t tell you I won’t go.”

“Okay,” Keith said while he processed that— whatever it was. He put his hands on either side of Shiro’s waist, smoothing up and down over his maroon sweater, and took a breath to steady his own voice before speaking again. “Okay. That’s fine. Just bring me with you next time—”

“ _Keith_ —”

“Bring me with you, or you don’t go.” Keith took in a deep breath through his nose and set his jaw. “I’m drawing a hard fucking line here, Shirogane. I lost you once, and maybe it wasn’t my fault then, but if it happened now—”

“Nothing I do is your fault, Keith.” 

“I’m supposed to protect you, Shiro! We’re supposed to _take care_ of each other. I’m just trying to keep you safe.” 

Shiro tipped his head back, throat bowed, and laughed. It was weak and without warmth; dry with exasperation. “So am I.”

Keith licked his lips and shifted his weight, easing back from Shiro. “This wasn’t how I planned on having this conversation,” he said as he ran one gloved hand up the back of his neck and into his hair, smoothing out his own ruffled nerves.

Shiro made a low sound of acknowledgment without opening his mouth. The tuft of white at his widow’s peak bobbed as his head nodded once. After a moment, he met Keith’s eyes and gave him a wan smile.

But there was something sincere in his eyes as he reached out with his prosthetic hand and gently guided Keith close again. He straightened, and sighed, and there was a weighty resolve in his voice as he said, “Okay. Next time, you can come, too. We’ll go together.”

Keith sagged forward in relief, his face slowly colliding with the soft fuzz of Shiro’s sweater-clad chest. It muffled his voice. “Fuck. Thanks.”

He felt the movement of Shiro’s brief laugh— more a snort than anything else— the squeeze of his metal arm around his waist.

“You forgot about the last one,” Keith said, craning his head back to look at Shiro as he tapped his fingers along the back of Shiro’s left hand. Under his skin, tendons and muscle were still taut from gripping the throwing axe.

“No, just waiting.”

Keith stepped back to watch, his arms loosely crossed in front of him.

Shiro worked his wrist, the silvery head of the hatchet flashing in the bright mid-day sun. He squared his shoulders, assumed the stance Keith had shown him earlier, and then sent the last hatchet sailing through the clearing. It connected with a solid thunk, head buried almost entirely in the target, the axe at the dead center of the bullseye’s red circle.

Keith’s open gape went unaddressed as Shiro sidled close, slightly smug, his shapely eyebrows raised in some expectation of praise.

“You’re going to have to pull that one out of the target,” was all Keith said as he headed into the brush to retrieve the other two hatchets. He didn’t think he _could_ remove it, even if he tried. 

As he doubled back with the other two axes in hand, he paused behind the target. The slab of softwood was more than five inches thick, and the blade of Shiro’s hatchet peeked out of the back side, with the wood surrounding it splintered outward from the force of impact. 

Keith peered around the edge of the target board to find Shiro busy trying to wrench the axe free. “Holy shit. What the hell.”

“Sorry,” Shiro said, shooting him a pleadingly apologetic look. “I can cut it out with the chainsaw, but then your target board…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Keith said dismissively. It’s not like there was any shortage of wood around them, and the old one had nearly been due for retirement anyway. “How did your aim get so much better?”

Shiro’s arm relaxed slightly, but his hand remained curled around the hatchet’s handle. He cocked his head to one side, questioning, and his squint was unsure.

Keith circled around him on a wide loop back toward the cabin, slow, his own expression surely a mirror of Shiro’s mild confusion. “Every time we tried to play baseball, you beaned the shit out of me. Unless… you _always_ had good aim, and that was all intentional—”

“No,” Shiro scoffed. “I don’t know. It was a lucky shot, probably. Or because I had pro tips from the best teacher around,” he flattered.

Keith hummed. He nodded toward the embedded axe. “Just leave it. Let’s eat lunch.”

The fridge was filled with fresh groceries, and Keith scanned the shelves hungrily. “You got pickled okra? That wasn’t on the list,” he murmured as he fished out a jar of the spicy vegetables.

“I grabbed everything I thought might make you feel more charitable toward me,” Shiro said as he leaned against the counter. He shrugged. “So there’s Tex-Mex trail mix and Takis and spray cheese and sardines, too.”

Keith laughed at the way Shiro’s nose wrinkled as he rattled off the snacks. “The sacrifices you make for me,” he said as he stretched up to peck Shiro on the lips. “Are you feeling better? You don’t feel so chilly lately.”

He gently felt his way up Shiro’s neck, lightly checking for swollen lymph nodes, and then pressed the back of his knuckles to Shiro’s forehead. 

“Please don’t tell me you think I have a fever now,” Shiro said, his slate-grey eyes half-lidded.

Keith rolled his eyes as he cracked into a jar of vinegary okra. “And you’re sure you feel fine?”

“Yeah, I feel fine,” Shiro said with a genuine grin. “I might even be up for a ride later, if you want.”

Keith perked instantly and speedily chewed through the whole okra in his mouth. “Really? The racer should still be all charged up from the last time I took it out. You wanna go right now? We could drop by and see Allura and Coran, or skim over the lake. Oh, or do the slopes again! Or,” his smile turned devilish, “go down the canyon--”

“No.”

Keith’s smile faltered in the face of Shiro’s stiff expression.

“No canyon,” Shiro clarified, clearing his throat. He straightened, as if nervous, and returned to a smile. “Anything else is fine, though. Uh… the lake sounds nice, if you don’t mind going that far. Just promise you won’t drop me in.”

“It was _one time_ ,” Keith said, pleased to see Shiro’s good humor already returning. “And I came right back for you, didn’t I?”

“Like always.”

  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ty ty  
> I have no idea how people format dialogue in texts, etc. If you know a better way, let me know pls


	3. Valley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for a dead deer and other creepy stuff

 

“You know,” Shiro said, “I’m not entirely opposed to having cake for breakfast again.”

Keith eyed the enormous slab of red velvet still occupying a full shelf in the fridge. It had been two days since his birthday, but all the generous slices they’d taken in the meantime hadn’t even left a dent.

With a sigh, Keith started grabbing ingredients for an actual breakfast. _One_ of them needed to be nutritionally responsible, and it clearly wasn’t going to be Shiro anymore— the eighty-dollar pile of bagged Halloween candy sitting on the dining room table was evidence enough of that.

“I’ll make eggs,” Keith said as he pulled out a carton, “and you can do some bagels with this.” He blindly handed off smoked salmon and a package of cream cheese, and then rummaged in the crisper drawers for any good vegetables to throw in with the eggs.

His eyes nearly rolled back into his skull at Shiro’s tiny sigh of disappointment.

“You need more protein, babe,” Keith reminded Shiro as he closed the fridge with his hip. “And probably less sugar.”

His boyfriend grumbled quietly, but there was no argument. His sweet tooth had grown, or his discipline had waned— or perhaps some unfortunate combination of both— but at least Shiro still had the good sense not to deny the need for actual nutrition.

Keith began cracking eggs into a large mixing bowl, grimacing at the messy work. He’d watched Hunk crack eggs one-handed many times before, but no amount of observation had ever improved his own technique. Over the years he’d gotten really good at fishing out bits of shell, though.

“So, I was thinking,” Keith said as he watched Shiro slicing bagels out of the corner of his eye, “about re-enrolling soon. It’s probably too late for next semester, but maybe summer—”

“Re-enrolling?”

“Yeah,” Keith answered, half-turning to Shiro, cracked eggshell still held in his fingers.

There was some faint confusion knitted in his brow, and his tone was equal parts curious and dismissive as he asked, “Why?”

“So I can graduate.” The words came free despite Keith's shock and uncomfortably dry mouth.

Shiro stood there, wedged in the corner in front of the toaster, wearing a thoughtful expression as he chewed. His good hand was splayed over the counter, bracing him as he leaned; an untoasted bagel with a bite out of it ringed the index finger of his prosthetic.

“And… you’re sure?” Shiro asked, squinting. “I mean, do you need to?”

“Do I _need_ to get my degree?” Keith asked, dumbfounded. For a moment, he forgot what he was doing; cold, gooey egg ran down along his thumb unchecked. “Are you serious?”

Shiro’s quick intake didn’t reassure him. 

“I just mean that if you didn’t want to, you don’t have to,” the other man answered, turning back to the task Keith had set him. He spread cream cheese with a deft hand; it hardly seemed like his prosthetic hampered him at all anymore. “It would be a lot to take on again, for both of us. I’m just wondering if it’s necessary, or…”

Keith tongued the inside of his cheek as he listened, focused on the pile of crushed shells sitting before him. He closed his eyes, waiting until the uncomfortable burn waiting behind them settled. “Why wouldn’t I want to?” 

Shiro’d moved mountains for him, time and again. He’d pushed Keith to aim for more, and had done the legwork to ensure he could get there— whether that was fielding calls and navigating the bureaucratic tangle of financial aid rather than let it drive Keith up a wall, or taking pains to ensure Keith had the resources to study and succeed. He’d shared Keith’s late nights _always_ , sometimes as a proofreader or a tutor or simply a sounding board for ideas, and with nothing but encouragement.

And something had changed. 

“Do you think I can’t do it?”

Shiro’s eyes went wide, then soft. His eyebrows knit in sudden worry. “No! No, Keith, it’s not that. It’s not you at all.”

Was that sincere? Keith’s stomach flopped, sharp-edged uncertainty working like a razor on his insides.

“I can’t advance without my forestry degree,” Keith said, thinking of meticulous plans he and Shiro had once made, all their ambitions lined up side by side. “And I can’t support us both on my current salary forever, Shiro. Especially if you’re going to binge on candy to the tune of a hundred bucks per month.”

He’d meant that part to be teasing, to lighten the mood.

“I can pick up the slack,” Shiro said after a few moments, but everything from his words to his bearing conveyed morose reluctance. “It’s probably time I get back to work, huh?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Keith said, worry forcing the words out in a rush. “I can take care of you, Shiro. Of us. I _want_ to,” he assured Shiro. “But I can’t unless I finish school, first.”

Shiro hummed a note that was more discontent than acknowledgment. His brow creased when he finally looked in Keith’s direction. “You can’t do that and work full-time.”

Keith opened his mouth. It would be a lot, but Iverson would probably work with him to free up his schedule for classes; he could take whatever online courses were available, too.

“I’d hardly have any time with you,” Shiro mumbled as he went back to slicing clingy layers of salmon.

“Wait. _That’s_ what you’re worried about? Shiro, I—” 

“It’s bad enough that you’re not here during the day,” he complained, side-eyeing Keith like it was his fault. 

Keith had to chew on that for a moment. Shiro had always enjoyed his solitude for meditation and reading and catching up on work— 

“I didn’t realize it was eating you up like that,” Keith said, a sigh fresh after. “You could come hang out at the visitor center,” he offered. “We could do lunch. Pidge would love to have you around for input, and you know how Lance is about you… Hell, you could get a job if you wanted. Something new. A change of pace. Iverson would _love_ to have you leading tours.”

Keith cracked another egg—poorly—and forced his thumbnail through the shell to pry it open. A dark seam of black welled along the crack in the pale brown shell, breaching the narrow break with the slow gush of tar.

“What the fuck,” Keith hissed as he dropped the egg onto the counter and drew back, nose wrinkled in disgust. It rolled, stopped, and began to slowly ooze a gelatinous, pitch-black slime onto the polished stone surface.

“Wash your hands,” Shiro said, voice firm, suddenly looming behind Keith.

A cold hand pressed against Keith’s hip, gently urging him toward the sink.

Dark film clung to the edge of his nail, as if he’d dipped it in motor oil and a thin coating remained. Keith rinsed his hands with water so scalding it nearly made his eyes tear up, yet the tip of his thumb still felt numb with cold.

“What the _fuck_. Shiro, have you ever seen anything like that? It—”

“It’s rotten,” Shiro said. With a thick pile of paper towels—and under normal circumstances, Keith would’ve been aghast at witnessing him use so many at once—he swept up the egg and wiped the counter clean. 

“That?” Keith couldn’t help but sound incredulous. “It doesn’t smell rotten, just… I don’t know,” he muttered, wiping his hand over the fabric of his flannel pajama bottoms. “Cold and gooey black. It’s weird.”

Shiro’s lips parted for a moment, but just the quiet hiss of an inhaled breath came. The muscles along the front of his throat flexed as he swallowed down whatever response he had been considering. “Yeah. It is. I’ll buy some fresh ones later today.”

“Not really my issue here,” Keith sighed as he dumped out the bowl full of cracked eggs; a single drop of the rotten egg had fallen in and spread like ink in water. There were still bagels and salmon, he supposed as he rubbed his index finger back and forth over the tip of his thumb. “But okay.”

\----------

The crisp fall air didn’t do much to clear his head. Neither did the forest’s quiet. Calm didn’t seep into him alongside the steady chill that found the gaps in his down-filled ranger jacket; clarity didn’t come with hours alone in piney mountain air that whispered of approaching snow.

Keith was miles down the Black Lion Mountain trail, checking the integrity of the path and pruning back encroaching branches, when he spied something dark strewn across the packed-earth ahead. He broke into a sprint, at first worried it was a hiker dressed in black— shining black, like the almost-oily gleam of rainproof windbreakers— wet, almost, although the last rains passed days ago and the nearest creek was half a mile downhill—

Closer, he could tell it wasn’t human. That should’ve given Keith more relief than the faint, distant twinge he felt. 

He had to step back, an arm raised to shield the lower half of his face, as he tried to make sense of the eviscerated animal sprawled over the leaves and dark earth. Its spine was bent, its underside bowed and split wide; the curved tips of charred, black ribs were exposed, reaching out from its flesh like bared fangs. Worst— absolutely the worst, even with the bloodless gore fanned across the ground and its legs jutting at unnatural angles— was the color. That oily, glistening black across its body, catching the light like asphalt after a rain. Strangely stenchless. No flies thickened the air with their buzzing; no corpulent white maggots dotted its ink-dark flesh.

A deer, Keith determined by the charcoal-crumble of antlers near its skeletal head, though its size was unusual and its skull seemed misshapen. Too many teeth, maybe, lining its blackened jaws. He thought of the scorched trees, sapped of life and color; he remembered the bony remains he found one day, weeks ago, that had mystified himself and Pidge.

Usually he cleared carcasses from the trails, on the few occasions an animal died in such an unfortunate spot. But Keith hesitated to touch this— if it could spread from trees to wildlife, there was no reason to think it couldn’t affect him, too. So he took pictures, radioed in the location, and pulled out a roll of yellow tape to cordon off the section of trail until the other rangers on duty could properly dispose of the thing. Or collect it? Iverson would want to see it, and possibly Pidge, too.

Keith would rather not.

But he couldn’t help but look back as he stalked his way back down the path, with a tamped-down terror he chalked up to some primal fear of pursuit. It kept the hair along his neck and arms standing on end long after the dead creature faded from sight. Without meaning to, his pace quickened into an easy jog that nonetheless left him breathless and damp with cold sweat.

He closed the trailhead and waited until Iverson and two other rangers arrived, rolling past in one of the park’s tiny, propane-fueled trucks. He warned them that it was unusual and gruesome, but the look that Iverson and the two attendant rangers shared was more tired than concerned.

Keith still hadn’t quite shaken the uneasy feeling by the time he reached the main office, although for once he found the building’s solid walls and fluorescent lights and milling people _comforting_. 

He grabbed his sandwich from the fridge in the staff breakroom, filled his bottle with water from the tap, and then slipped back out into the visitor center to find the reception desk.

“Whoa, what are you doing here?” Lance asked as Keith settled in behind the wall-length desk with his lunch in hand. Some sort of synth pop blared from the earbud delicately poised between Lance’s index and thumb, and he stared down Keith with a look that could sour milk. 

“Eating lunch.” Keith spun the chair back and forth, knees swaying as he did, the brown paper bag containing his sandwich perched precariously atop one thigh.

“Dude. This is my desk. You can’t just eat here! Guests could walk up and see you being _you_.”

“Oh no,” Keith deadpanned as he cast a pointed look at the sole pair of grey-haired visitors currently browsing through the brochures and maps posted along the walls of the center.

Lance grumbled and went back to clicking furiously at something on his screen, his earbuds back in place and blasting music to drown out his unwelcome guest.

Keith didn’t mind for the moment. A thin layer of sweat still clung to his nape, and he ran a gloved hand up through his hair to lift it and let the building’s warm, dry air touch his skin. His stomach shuddered and growled, apparently undeterred by the gory sight along the trail. 

He unfurled the paper bag and withdrew a sandwich-stuffed ziplock. It popped open with a snap.

Which of course Lance could hear, somehow, over the pounding bass. It hardly seemed possible— but Lance _did_ seem to have a sixth sense for anything Keith might do to grate on his nerves. He tugged his earbuds free and turned in his chair just to glare at Keith.

Keith took a bite and chewed with deliberate slowness as Lance met his stare, the faint sounds of some bubbly pop anthem providing the background track to the uncomfortable moment.

“Did you even wash your hands? I can see the dirt under your nails from here,” Lance said, gaze darting from Keith’s face to his hands and then back again.

“Nope.” Keith shrugged and took another bite, taking care to lick a spot of mustard off of his thumb while maintaining eye contact.

“You’re really gross, you know that?” Lance asked, his slender nose wrinkling. “Does Shiro know how gross you are?”

“Yup,” Keith said before stuffing the last few bites of his sandwich into his mouth at once and chewing furiously. “He does,” he added with his mouth still full, knowing just how much Lance hated it.

“Just because your dad raised you in the woods doesn’t mean you have to eat like an animal,” Lance squeaked out, voice pitching high, as it tended to when he was irritated.

“Lance, we’ve all seen how you eat sour straws, so maybe go easy,” Pidge interrupted as she deposited a stack of forms beside Lance’s computer. She breezed out as quickly as she breezed in, but caught Keith’s eye long enough to shoot him a conspiratorial smile over Lance’s head.

There was a tinge of color on Lance’s cheeks as he swiveled back to his screen and started crafting a tweet about campsite fire safety, complete with a dozen or so emojis. 

After finishing his lunch in a matter of minutes, Keith pulled out his phone to check the weather forecast and skim through his email. Next, he sank a solid twenty minutes into online shopping, picking out new shirts and sweats for Shiro and a pair of hiking boots for himself.

“Keith, are you ordering the _exact_ same boots you have on in the _exact_ same color?”

“I like them,” he told Lance, frowning. “And they’re on sale. How could you even see my screen? How long were you looking?”

Lance’s muttering carried just far enough to be audible. “Can’t believe I thought you and Shiro were cool for so long. You’re both boring as hell.”

“Don’t you have tweets to be answering?”

Lance’s response—and it was sure to be a long one, given how deep of a breath he took—was averted by a ring from the phone beside his computer screen.

Keith grinned as the younger man’s face scrunched unhappily and he answered the call in his friendliest front-desk voice.

Absent of anything else to do and eager to distract himself, Keith spun in place and scrolled through his sparse social media feeds, liking pictures of Hunk’s latest culinary endeavors.

“So when are you gonna enroll again?” Lance questioned without looking at him. “I miss seeing you skulking around campus.”

“I don’t know,” Keith said, stopping halfway through a text to Shiro. “I want to, but I’m… not sure about it anymore.” 

Lance squinted at him. “Is it the tuition? I bet Sammie could wrangle you some other scholarship since you’d be furthering your education for your career here.”

“Don’t call Mr. Holt that. Pidge’ll deck you.” 

“Uh, sure. Like she could reach me,” Lance snorted.

Keith lifted one shoulder in a shrug before self-consciously folding his arms. “It would be a lot to dive back into, is all.”

His father had taught him about wilderness survival and self-sufficient living, and he’d picked up useful life skills with his foster families, but nothing had ever prepared him for navigating higher education. Maybe no one had expected it for him.

Seeking out financial aid, interacting with guidance counselors, approaching professors— none of it came natural. Not as naturally as it did for some, at least. Shiro was experienced with academia and knew who to call to straighten out Keith’s scheduling issues and inquire about financial support. Lance knew when rules could be bent and exceptions made, and had a knack for charming even the most tight-pinned university staff to his side.

“Yeah, but… if you wanted to, you’d get it done. In like, the most stubborn and stupid way possible, but you’d do it.”

Keith crossed his arms a little tighter, fingertips digging into his own bicep. 

“Look, I’ll even help you,” Lance sighed, his sharp chin resting on the heel of his hand. “If you’d let me before, you wouldn’t have paid for classes you could’ve gotten credit for.”

“How was I supposed to know? None of the AP courses I did well on were on the approved list—”

“Shh, shh, shh,” Lance said, his free hand waving in Keith’s face to silence him. “And Shiro will help with all the other stuff you get all anxious about. See? Nothing to worry about.”

Keith sank lower into his chair. “Shiro’s not… super into the idea.”

“Not into what idea?” Lance’s eyes widened, and when he spoke it came out in such a whispered rush that the words ran together. “ _Did you ask about him about the bondage thing_?”

“No!” Keith said forcefully. He struck out with a long leg, pushing at Lance’s chair to send it rolling back. “About me going back to school. He… didn’t think it was necessary.”

Lance made a quiet noise. “Doesn’t really sound like Shiro.”

Keith started to agree, but his voice ran dry. “He seems different lately,” Keith said, uncertain whether Lance could even hear it. The mere thought carried guilt, as ugly and dark-hearted as the animal he’d seen broken across the trail. “Sometimes I look at him and there’s this— just a moment where I don’t even recognize him, almost.”

The regret and shame came immediately. Keith folded his hands over his face and rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Shit. Shit, that sounds terrible.”

“Yeah, kinda,” Lance said, his eyebrows knitting. “But listen, as much as I love to find reasons to roast you— and there are _sooo_ many, believe me— that's not one you need to drag yourself for. You’re not wrong for noticing he’s changed. I mean, he _has_. It seems kind of par for the course after spending a year in hardcore survival mode.”

“Yeah,” Keith agreed.

“And he’s been a little snippier, for sure,” Lance added, low and borderline morose. “Anyway, what I’m getting at is that what Shiro wants isn’t necessarily what’s best. You need to finish school, bro. And Shiro’s smart and sensible and Armani-underwear-model handsome—”

“ _Lance_ —”

“— and he’ll come around. You’re like two-thirds of the way to graduating anyway, and I’m not going to let you both turn into mountain hermits,” he said, decisive and final as he turned back to his screen.

Keith watched Lance pull up the university’s page and click around, his jaw set and brow furrowed as he took Keith’s academic future into his hands.

“Thanks, Lance. You’re actually… not terrible when it comes to talking about stuff like this.” Keith tried to keep the honest amazement out of his voice. 

Lance eyed him. “Yeah, I know. But hey, listen, if you _really_ want to thank me, you could come to Allura’s Halloween party and be my co-wingman. You and Hunk, the wind beneath my wings! Send me soaring straight into Allura’s arms!”

“Sounds great,” Keith answered, his drawl dead flat. “But I’m not sure Shiro’s up for a party right now.”

Lance dismissed his concern with an exaggerated _pssssh_. “Tell him there’s gonna be a karaoke machine and peach schnapps. Oh, and sturdier tables this time.” He waggled his eyebrows.

Keith’s head lolled to the side. Shiro had made him— and everyone else— delete every embarrassing photo and every second of incriminating video from Allura’s Halloween party two years back, but him drunkenly stripping off his homemade astronaut costume piece-by-piece still lived on in precious memory. “I’m pretty sure he’s eternally sworn off both of those things.”

“Shame.” Lance’s sigh carried genuine disappointment, and his far-off stare was a smidge too wistful for Keith’s liking. “At least I still have the pictures.”

Pictures that shouldn’t still exist, per Shiro’s itemized hangover email on the first of November. Pictures _Keith_ didn’t even have, regretfully. Latent gratitude for Lance’s listening ear forced him to let it slide. He’d pretend he hadn’t heard that, to preserve Shiro’s dignity, and he’d change the topic before Lance could elaborate on exactly what sort of photos he had squirreled away.

Keith used his heels to drag his chair across the cheap tile flooring, closing the gap between himself and Lance. He had had grown up on a farm— or worked summers on some relative’s land, or something like that— and that was probably good enough to make him some sort of authority on barnyard oddities.

“Hey Lance, have you ever seen… like, have you ever cracked open an egg and—”

Lance’s expression morphed from intent confusion to dry disgust in an instant. “Bloody baby chicken inside? Uh, yeah. Luis would always threaten to leave one under my pillow if I didn’t do the dishes for him.”

“No. Like... black goo.”

“A _what_?” Lance asked, deadpan, his eyes heavily-lidded. He pushed his chair from the desk and swiveled to face Keith in one fluid movement.

“An egg filled with cold, shiny slime,” Keith whispered, eyes narrowed. “Opaque. It looked like runny licorice jello or something.”

Lance stared straight at him, unamused. “Are you… is this a joke? Like, a Keith-joke? Like how you laugh at ‘pasta water’?” he asked, squinting uncertainly. “Just tell me if you’re trying to be funny.”

“No,” Keith nearly snapped, his frustration ready to boil over. “I’m not. I tried googling it but I couldn’t find any pictures that looked like the same.”

“Okay, okay,” Lance soothed. “Honestly? I can’t say I’ve ever gotten a tar-filled goo-egg before, and it kinda sounds like it’s worth complaining to the store about. And I’ll ask the resident _eggs_ -pert tonight—”

“Oh, that was bad,” Keith said flatly.

“You’re just jealous that I can pun with Shiro better than you can.”

He was. “I am not.”

“Sure, buddy.” Lance winked before turning back to his computer.

Keith sat back and slowly spun his chair side to side, fingertips tapping along the end of the armrest. His gaze went out across the lobby, through one of the massive, wall-length windows. Beyond the parking lot and other buildings, forest-clad mountainsides loomed.

“I should get back out there,” Keith sighed. “Thanks for letting me hang with you. And listening and stuff.”

“You literally sat down to eat in my work area, but whatever,” Lance said, shrugging. 

“Yeah, well,” Keith said, shrugging back. “This is like the only time I can see you anymore, since you’re always tucked away in here. Behind a _desk_ ,” he added through a wrinkled nose, full of distaste.

“Hey, it’s not my fault Sammie knows I’m a hot commodity,” Lance smirked. “You don’t hide a face like this—” He worked his angles for effect. “—in some lab or dirty old woods.”

Keith squinted. “For working for the national park service, you’re awfully repulsed by nature.”

“What? I _love_ nature,” Lance murmured as he flitted through social media platforms that Keith didn’t even recognize. “I mean, I like natural products, and those come from nature. The key to eternal youth could be in… in bark or something. Tree sap. I dunno. Anyway, nature’s magical.”

“You could experience it firsthand, you know. You’re literally surrounded by one of the largest, most pristine parks left in the continental U.S.,” Keith said. 

Lance sat up in his seat, stretching his neck to peer over his computer and the row of shelves along the wall that held pamphlets and maps for visitors. He squinted, nodded, and settled back down. “Yeah… I’m good. But you have fun grubbing around out there, okay? Keep an eye out for Bigfoot,” he said, already focused on his screen again. “Or are you, like, forest buddies by now?”

Keith sighed. “Bye, Lance.”

\-----------

 

The ride home should’ve been uneventful. It _had_ been, until Keith caught a flash of something pitch black out of the corner of his eye.

He slowed, stopped, and reversed, the old pickup’s engine huffing as he changed gears. There, visible from the driveway, was a thin tree turned into something macabre, unreal. The pitch of its dark and skeletal, spindly shape made it seem like a crack, almost— a sprawling fracture in space itself, windowing in on some lurking void.

Minutes later and the afflicted tree still hung in Keith’s thoughts, concern and unsated curiosity vying for his attention as he crossed the threshold. He tossed his keys and shrugged out of his jacket, then sat to untie his hiking boots.

His troubled thoughts were interrupted by a chirp from his phone— a clear, gentle tone that belied the somber news it heralded.

“Hey,” Keith said as he knocked against the bedroom’s doorframe, a little breathless as Shiro looked up from the soft, electric-glow of his laptop screen.

His boyfriend was half under the covers, his pillows propped against the headboard to cushion his back while he typed— soft and content, safe in a place that Keith was loathe to bring this sort of work home to. Part of him was surprised this was the first incident the park had had since Shiro’s return. His tongue withered behind his teeth while he searched for gentle words.

“Something wrong?” Shiro asked after a few more seconds passed with Keith still stock-still in the doorway.

“We, uh, got a call. Iverson needs me to help with S-and-R,” Keith said, his hands slipping into the pockets of his durable black denim.

“Oh? Oh. Well, there’s not much daylight left,” Shiro said softly, hesitant, gaze drifting to the amber afternoon light spilling in through the windows. “Are you sure you should go?”

Keith blinked at the question. “Yeah… yeah, and I need to hurry. I just wanted you to know I’ll be gone a while.”

He hoped that would be enough to curb any argument before it began— he could hardly stand idle while someone was missing in his park, and that Shiro would suggest as much had caught him off-guard. It was already three in the afternoon, sure, but the weather was good and Keith knew no one located lost visitors as quickly as he could.

“Hopefully not long,” Shiro said, and Keith muttered an agreement. He sat the laptop aside and stood, approaching Keith with uncertain steps. “Uh, can I help? Should I come?”

“No,” Keith answered, probably too quickly. “No, it’s fine. You should stay here.”

Shiro’s smile was painfully soft. “You afraid I’ll get lost again?”

Keith glanced away. Lost, or wandering the woods of his own volition again? Shiro hadn’t appeared sorely affected by his post-traumatic stress over the last few months, but Keith wondered. He was no stranger to Shiro’s constant efforts to avert worry, and the last thing he wanted was to risk Shiro reliving that trauma again.

“I’m not letting you out there without me unless you’ve got a sat phone and full survival gear,” Keith said as he grabbed Shiro around the middle and pressed his face into the center of the man’s broad chest.

“That’s fair,” Shiro said, his hands soft on Keith’s shoulders as they parted. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

Keith let his hands skim down to Shiro’s hips, drawing out the moment even as crucial seconds slipped by. He should be gone already. He should be moving toward the door, should be breaking away from Shiro by now, but… 

There was a note off somewhere, and the discord was faint but distracting. It was the nagging worry that clung to him now, fearful he would lose Shiro again the second he let him slip from sight.

Keith moved his hands to Shiro’s wrists, thumbs rubbing at the veiny underside of one and the smoothly jointed metal of the other. He did what felt right, ignoring the uncertainty hanging between them, and guided Shiro’s hands down his shoulders and over his chest until they were fanned over his ribs and his heart and sensitive skin that flushed bright red at moments like this. 

His badge and ID pressed into him at the weight of Shiro’s heavy touch, and still it didn’t feel quite as it should.

Keith listened for the slightly ragged sound of Shiro’s breaths as he ran his fingertips down the older man’s forearms, and up over his knuckles and the bends of his fingers. He wrapped both his hands around Shiro’s wrist, gripping much-loved flesh and blood tightly; he slid upward, clasped Shiro’s hand between both of his, and curled his fingers into Shiro’s square palm.

When Shiro spoke, it was whispered into the crown of his hair, nose brushing his scalp, aching with fondness. “Go, Keith. And be careful.”

\---------- 

The rundown was simple, and Keith committed what few details they were given to memory. 

Florona Waterson, nineteen, red-haired and nearly six-feet tall, last seen around nine yesterday morning, headed up Peak Pollux. She’d been wearing a splashy yellow jacket and had plans to meet a friend for lunch today. Her car still sat in the parking lot. No one else along the trail remembered passing her.

As the days grew shorter, so did their time to search. A night alone in unknown and unforgiving territory was a frightening experience on its own, but ill-prepared and facing the first breaths of winter? She had already endured one night, and the first could lead to more, if they weren’t quick enough to catch her trail; the longer the missing had to wander, the more lost they became. 

The sight of a peculiar mix of yellow and green caught Keith’s eye—Hunk’s usual jacket combo for volunteer work, its pockets loaded with emergency snack bars and multi-tools—and had him edging through the loose assembly of staff and helpful hikers.

Hunk gave him a tiny wave. On either side of him sat two of Allura’s tracking dogs, no doubt loaned out to help with the search.

Red whined at the sight of Keith, tail thumping as the lean dog itched to dart to his side. They were well-trained, though, both in basic manners and search and rescue—Allura’s father had seen to that when he first gathered five stray pups for his new pet project, and she had continued training them as a valuable resource to the community.

“Hey, girl,” Keith said, lowering into a crouch to greet the redbone coonhound mutt with a rub behind her ears. “You’re here to help?”

“Allura is stuck in some fancy dinner meeting, so Coran let me take the wheel. Er, the leash, I guess. Wow, Red still _really_ likes you, huh?”

“She’s a good girl.” Keith tilted his head back as Red licked at his chin, up his jaw, and tried to get the corner of his mouth. It was gross, but in a good way—one that had Keith returning to the thought of adopting a dog or two. 

The timing might be right. Without his work, Shiro was no longer captive to long hours and schedules dictated by the stars. Meaning, he could field the puppy training and the pee pads. Eventually, the dog could be a running partner, a loyal guardian, an extra set of eyes to alert Keith when things were amiss…

They could even go through search and rescue training, like Red and Goldie and the rest. It was a strenuous program, and the upkeep was a considerable commitment, but they’d be doing good for people. At the very least, Shiro would have good company during the days and nights that Keith was busy at work or school, and it might soften the hardship of having less time together again.  

Maybe.

As the search team organized and fanned out from the last place Florona had been seen, the tracking dogs worked to find some trace of her. Her scent was weak, Keith supposed, as he watched the animals scour the earth with twitching noses.

Iverson sent Keith and Hunk further up the Peak Pollux trail together. “Cover what ground you can,” he told Keith, an eye on the sun above. “Maybe one of these two will catch her trail.”

Keith was beginning to doubt it despite himself. Quick cases like this should have fresh trails ending in easy finds, yet it was already shaping up to be anything but.

The woods quieted as they passed through with the two working dogs, each of them hungry for the scent they had picked up from Florona’s car. Goldie and Red wove through the woods on either side of them, barely within eyesight, their brightly colored vests standing out in flashes between tree trunks and low brush.

They’d covered at least another half-mile before Red circled back to Keith and sat herself down in front of him, ready to report her find.

Keith waited for Hunk to whistle Goldie back before addressing Red. “Alright. Show me, Red.”

At his command, the coonhound turned and bounded back into the woods at whip neck speed.

Keith followed closest, while Hunk and Goldie brought up the rear. The gap between them stretched dangerously wide at points— Keith didn’t want to risk slowing or distracting Red from the trail, but neither did he want to lose Hunk while leaping over a creek or fallen fir.

A small clearing lay ahead, and at first Keith was relieved to see Red milling in place as she waited for her slower packmates to catch up. 

Hunk gasped from somewhere down the hill behind Keith, his breaths coming in heavy puffs. “Is she up there? Florona Waterson? Or her stuff?”

“No,” Keith sighed as he scanned the stretch of woods Red had brought them to, picking through the tall grass before them. There was no sign of human presence— no prints, no litter, no clothing left behind as a trail marker.

Keith eyed Red next, his eyes narrowing. She spun in place, sniffing hard, her movements stiff as she prowled the clearing. Faintly, Keith thought he heard a growl rumbling low in her throat.

“She lost the scent,” he said to Hunk, kneeling down in the dying wildflowers and dried grasses for a better look. “And I think she’s pissed about it.”

“Uh, Keith…”

The coonhound eventually circled close, flinching when Keith laid his hand at the back of her neck. Keith mumbled an apology and soothed her before acknowledging Hunk. “Yeah?” 

“Is it just me or did the sun just set?”

A glance up found the woods around them had deepened to the color of late sunset; already stars and distant planets sparkled above them as the last rays of light shrunk from the skies. 

“It… it can’t have,” Keith muttered as he rose, already fishing for his phone. He blinked down at the lockscreen. “How the fuck has it been five hours? We just left! It’s been like forty-five minutes— _an hour_ , tops—”

“Yeah, I’m with you, but uh,” Hunk groaned, tapping his fingertips together anxiously, “we’re alone in the woods and night is falling and I didn’t prepare for this, except for the solar lantern I brought and like a day’s worth of dry rations.”

“Calm down,” Keith said, his gloved hands spread wide. He pushed back his mop of hair and stared at the rapidly cooling, darkening woods surrounding them, trying to find out when and where he’d lost all sense of time. “Once we get back on the trail, we’ll be back at the parking lot in less than an hour.”

“Do you know the way back to the trail?” Hunk squeaked, crowding close to him.

Keith looked up and around, orienting himself on the last traces of sunlight and early constellations. “Yeah. Come on. Red, Goldie, you too.”

He was confident as he traced their way back toward the marked trail, pulling out his emergency flashlight to accompany the glow of Hunk’s mini-lantern. He radioed Iverson and briefed him on Red’s lost trail and their ensuing return— in between Iverson’s static-lined outbursts over their poor time management and irresponsible neglect of their radios. 

Keith got the sense that Iverson didn’t quite believe them when he and Hunk insisted their radios had never once gone off during their five-hour absence.

They passed familiar landmarks— boulders Keith recognized from Red’s earlier run, soft soil that still held their footprints— and every minute that passed promised that they were that much closer to home.

But another hour elapsed, and the night deepened. The trail never appeared, no matter how many times Keith anticipated it.

“Keith,” Hunk said, tired and wavering. “We’re lost.”

“We’re not— I’m not lost. It just… it doesn’t make sense.” He trailed his fingers along the trunk of a tree they passed, nails prying at looks bark. “We should’ve crossed the trail a long time ago. We should be— we shouldn’t be so far out! It shouldn’t be taking this long.”

“My radio’s dead, Keith,” Hunk said quietly behind him, frantic clicking accompanying his worried tone. “You need to call Iverson again.”

He’d never hear the end of it from the older rangers. Keith grabbed his radio and held the comm button. “Keith, reporting in.”

They waited, but the line returned no response.

“Anyone there? Red Ranger here,” Keith tried again, a lump settling in his throat when only silence answered them. “Please respond.”

“Shit. Oh, this is bad, Keith. What do we do? What do we do?”

Keith’s teeth already ached from the tension in his jaw, a clench he hadn’t realized he had been holding. It promised a headache later, if he couldn’t keep it in check. “We keep going,” he said, voice raspy from the cold air.

He closed his eyes in a weak wince as Hunk’s reluctant sigh sounded somewhere behind him; footsteps soon followed, along with the gentle clinking of the tracking dogs’ tags.

Soon enough, nothing looked familiar. Tree branches masked the stars, and no matter how many times he consulted his father’s compass to lead them southeast again, the terrain never shifted to anything recognizable.

The night air had a density to it that Keith had never taken notice of before. It hemmed them in, crowding around the weak glow of Hunk’s lantern, chasing at the edges of Keith’s flashlight. It pooled thicker in places, like heavy fog, and when Keith breathed in between his teeth, he imagined that it might somehow be possible to choke on it.

He’d have dismissed it as irrational worrying, his mind playing tricks in the same way it did when he thought he saw dark figures standing just at the edge of the periphery, caught in a glimpse out of the corner of his eye. He would have chided himself for sounding like Lance peddling his ghost stories. He would have, except the feeling crawling over his skin made it seem all too possible.

“Keith. Keith. Keith—”

“What?” Keith snapped back, turning his head just a fraction.

“Keith, the dogs are scared.”

Keith turned, slow, his muscles rigid with tension and reluctance. The lid on his worry took a serious dent at the sight of the tracking dogs.

Goldie keened low, tail tucked and blocky head lowered, his high pitched cries giving way to stressed panting. Red was silent, but the tight pull of her mouth and the intensity of her stare— past him, into the woods— was as disturbing.

Keith kept the flashlight on Red a moment longer, trying to read her body language and glean some insight. There were bears and moose and wolves in these woods— and a missing girl, as lost as they were.

The cold seared deep along his throat and into his lungs. “Red,” Keith whispered. He cleared his throat as one of her ears perked in his direction. “Find?”

Red stalked forward, edging just ahead of Keith. It was a far cry from her first find, all breakneck sprinting and springy leaps, eager to locate the scent and lead Keith to its source.

He panned the flashlight around as he and Hunk followed the lean dog onward.

“Does she have Florona’s scent again?” Hunk sounded trepidatious. Skeptical.

“I don’t know,” Keith admitted. Whatever it was, she was set on it. Perhaps it was their own scent and she was leading them back the way they’d come— Keith would be grateful if so, but the winding crawl of their path made it feel unlikely.

Red’s hackles raised as she bent low into a defensive stance, a ridge of ruffled fur running down to the base of her tail.

Something in the air pulled Keith’s hair taut, the tension along his arms and nape nearly painful. His skin prickled with goosepimples even under layered sleeves and fleece-lined jacket. The cold wormed its way through his clothes to his skin, wicking away his warmth.

Red craned her head back and barked, whole body drawn taut as a bowstring.

Keith followed the coonhound’s upward point, gaze trailing up the massive breadth of a tree some twenty paces ahead. Its branches streaked across the sky, jagged as obsidian, their cross-woven outlines blotting out the bright stars and cutting across the glow of the Milky Way.

High up, near the tree’s barren crown, there was another outline. 

Keith puzzled over the silhouette, brow furrowed as he craned his neck back, tilted his head, changed angles half a dozen times. Red’s barks were interspersed with growls and the wet snap of her jaws; Hunk’s stream of worrying was fainter than the wind.

The shape of it made sense all at once: bare, bent limbs, still despite the steady breeze that rustled in the heights; a torso twisted in between two stout branches; the hint of a limply hanging head.

His gut told him they had found Florona, missing barely more than a day. It whispered other things, too, while his head still begged for answers—that the girl was dead somewhere she shouldn’t be, and that this place, wherever they were, was no place for himself or Hunk, either.

Keith had seen bodies before, and parts of bodies. He’d found them crashed on cliffsides and helped older rangers recover lost hikers from the gaps between the rocks along streams. He’d stayed up late with Shiro nights afterward, taking comfort in the arms wrapped tight around him until he fell asleep to a mumbled lullaby in a language he only knew in bits and pieces.

Even the most careful and well-traveled visitors to these and any woods could find themselves left to the mercy of mother nature. _The mercy of mother nature._ That was a phrase his father had used, always with a tone that suggested it was to be avoided at all costs. Loving nature didn’t mean being loved back, after all.

But this was unlike anything he had seen before. It reeked of something unnatural, and not only because it was cruel and careless and defied easy explanation—death was often many of those things. It was something that hung in the air, like the acrid scent of burnt ozone after a lightning strike. It waited in the thick darkness that shifted around them and the grasping cold that gnawed at their warmth like it was flesh to rend from bone. 

“Keith,” Hunk breathed beside him, his horror folded into the waver of his voice. “Is that…?”

“Yeah,” Keith croaked. “I think so.”

The spell broke. Keith _felt_ the air around them change. Something just beyond the edge of his sight shifted and moved, watching them.

Red’s barking resumed, more frantic than before, while Goldie’s whines rose to a fever pitch. 

Fire worked in Keith’s muscles, and a shiver rippled down his spine. The adrenaline made him feel warm again— his legs burned with the need to run, his body screaming for him to take flight. 

“We need to go,” he said, blindly taking hold of Hunk’s sleeve. “Right now.”

“We’re just leaving her?” Hunk protested as Keith tried to turn him away. 

“Hunk—”

There was a crash ahead of them, in the dark. Just out of sight, wood groaned and shrieked before breaking apart with cracks and pops. Worse than the sound was the pressure— it forced Keith’s ears to pop, sudden enough to leave him dizzy.

“Oh God, let’s go!” Hunk screamed as he turned and started running with Keith.

They skidded down the wooded hillside, half-blind and deaf to everything but the growing roar behind them. The dogs darted ahead, leading the way down a narrow game trail rife with whip-thin branches that needled and stung as they raced past.

 If his own feet were a little less than sure, then he could only wonder at how well Hunk managed to keep pace without stumbling over the overgrown path’s sudden dips and rough roots. They were too breath-starved for words, but a shared glance over his shoulder communicated enough. Hunk was afraid, too, and exhausted, and desperate not to be left behind.

Keith fought instinct and slowed a hair—enough to make sure he could still hear Hunk just a moment behind him. He held onto the sight of the dogs, chasing any flash of fur or neon orange vest amid the fluid, foggy dark.

The cold made Keith’s teeth ache, and every sharp inhalation seared at the softness of his throat and lungs. A stuttered gasp behind him forced Keith to slow to a trudge— to watch the dogs disappear over the crest of a wooded hill.

“Sorry,” Hunk panted as they came to an unsteady pause. “I got caught… on something.”

Hunk winced as Keith turned and aimed the small flashlight directly into his face, surveying the damage: a minor cut, but messy. Blood ran from his brow down to his chin, mingling with clammy sweat; it dripped down onto his shirt collar, leaving a stain that grew by the moment. He bent and braced his hands against his knees before vomiting up a thin stream of mostly water.

Somewhere far behind—though not far enough, not _nearly_ far enough— Keith heard the lumbering groan of a tree giving way. It was followed by the brighter pops and snaps of saplings and thin-trunked trees as they bent and broke. Under it all was a deep, windy terror of a noise that Keith had never heard before.

“Keith, what _is_ that?” Hunk asked, sides heaving, his whole body trembling with fear or cold or exertion.

It reminded Keith of storms on the plains and the howling he’d only ever heard while clinging to his father in the safety of the cellar, only this was _guttural_. It undulated like the cry of something living. “No idea.”

“The dogs…” Hunk said softly, worried as he squinted into the dark. He’d lost his lantern at some point, unsurprisingly. “Which way?”

“I-I don’t know,” Keith admitted. 

The beam of his flashlight cut swathes through the darkness— Keith angled it back and forth, up the slope, in between the trees— but it was never enough. Never far enough, never wide enough. It had been years since he’d ever felt an inkling of lost in these woods, and now he was adrift in the sensation.

Keith pushed forward anyway, not knowing if they were only being thrust deeper into the wilderness at this point. But any direction that took them further from the encroaching— animal? being? force? — was better than letting it gain more ground on them. Keith would rather take his chances with exposure and exhaustion than against whatever could rend through healthy trees and create sounds like that. 

They clambered over a fallen log that stretched so wide Keith was half in wonder, his clammy hands slipping on moss as he dragged himself up and over. And when had there ever been _vines_ like this around here? So many of them, thick and dark and dangerously clingy as they stumbled down yet another slope.

Always, Keith kept one ear trained on the woods at their back, listening for the whisper of something passing through leaves and saplings, still persistent on their trail. 

“Keith?” a voice called, faint against the wind and the growing rustle amid the trees. 

The quick pass of a flashlight followed, its panning beam small and distant. Light caught in the night air whenever it shone in their direction, as if suspended on dust; it bent, too, in a way that reminded Keith of being underwater.

“Is that Shiro?” Hunk whispered, voice strained. The name came again, and this time Hunk grasped at Keith’s side in exuberant relief. “Oh my God, that’s Shiro! Come on, Keith. Buddy, c’mon!”

Keith hadn’t been as certain; too focused on the woods around them, maybe, to recognize it as Shiro’s call. But as they descended the rest of the path— first at a frantic jog, and then as a downhill run that nearly sent them head-over-heels— he could hear Shiro clearer.

The thickness surrounding them eased the closer they barreled toward Shiro, their lungs and legs aching. Quick thinking on Shiro’s part kept him from being bowled over by Hunk at the last second.

“Oh, Shiro,” he gasped as he fell into the older man’s arms, “Shiro! Oh man, I’ve never been so happy to see you!”

“What are you doing out here?” Keith asked as he hobbled closer, his chest clenching like a knot pulled tight. Though practically dead on his feet, Keith was tempted to heave Shiro onto his shoulder and explain the situation as they ran. “How did you— never mind. We need to keep moving, Shiro. We’re trying to get back to park central but nothing is making any sense, and something is following us and—”

“Keith,” Shiro said, his feet firmly planted and his grip on Keith’s shoulders firm enough to ache a little. “It’s okay. You’re home.”

His lips parted. A ways past Shiro, he could see the glow of the cabin’s lights and the faint glimmer off the aluminum roof of the car shelter. Keith twisted his head and found the surrounding woods suddenly struck him as familiar— the same outcroppings of stone that he knew from almost daily walks, and trees nicked by thrown knives, and a worn, narrow path that led down to the dirt and gravel of their driveway.

“How far did we run?” Hunk moved like he was in a daze, his thick eyebrows drawn low in puzzlement. The side of his face was dark with tacky, half-dried blood.

“Not this far,” Keith answered, angling himself to see around his boyfriend’s broad torso. It didn’t make sense in the slightest— they’d gone up the Peak Pollux trailhead, and the absolute straightest path from there to home would still be upward of forty miles. “There’s no way. We— it’s been—how long has it been?”

Shiro’s grey eyes met his, steady and unblinking, but Keith flinched when cold metal traced its way up to cup along his jaw and fix him in place.

He had a headache that left his ears ringing. His legs felt as supportive as slush. His mouth was dry, and it occurred to Keith that he couldn’t recall the last time he’d had even a mouthful of water.

“It’’s late. You’ve been missing all night,” Shiro said, his voice achingly low. “But now you’re safe.”

It was what Keith wanted to hear, desperately. It wasn’t true, but the relief of Shiro telling him so won out for the moment. He pressed his face against Shiro’s chest and let himself sag against him, counting on strong arms to keep him mostly upright. 

Shiro did one better and heaved Keith up into his arms, draping him over his shoulder. Somewhere further down the trail, Keith noticed that Shiro had gotten hold of Hunk, too, his arm tight around the other man as he supported him the rest of the way down to the cabin.

Either it was soothing, swaying to Shiro’s effortless carry, or exhaustion was taking hold. Maybe both. Despite the lure of home and Shiro’s warm promises, Keith still felt far from safe.

But there was no sound in the woods behind them to make Keith’s heart tighten and his skin slick, no shadowed corpses hung in these trees, and nothing slipped out of the shadows to pursue them. Nothing except for Goldie and Red. From where he dangled over Shiro’s shoulder, Keith watched the two dogs follow them down to the cabin at a cautious distance.

It was curious, he thought, how they hung back. How they darted and turned, as if ready to bolt again. How they ignored the weak beckon of his fingers and the reedy whistle he managed through parched lips.

As Keith felt the jostle of the porch steps and the tug of bone-weary slumber, he tried mustering a call to the dogs again. Electric-gold light spilled from the front door, down the stairs, and across the ground; Shiro half-turned on the threshold, his shadow carving a swath that threatened to swallow every inch of it.

Goldie and Red slunk low and darted underneath the porch, more willing to brave a night under watch by the woods than follow them inside.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to split this chapter up into two. Sorry!


	4. Canyon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is it! and it's a long one, sorry

The waking world appeared in a blur, in and out of focus. Heavy shafts of golden afternoon light were suspended on stirred dust in the air, warm as they landed across the bed and the blankets piled atop Keith in a layer thicker than the fallen leaves outside.

He laid and watched the sway of treetops outside the bedroom window. The sun shined and the birds sang, and Keith was reminded of his muted shock after losing Shiro-- when no apocalypse came, no breakdown of the laws of the universe, no sudden unravelling of spacetime. Nothing. The earth had continued to turn, day by day, heedless of Keith’s shattered world and the slow work of gathering its pieces.

And this was too unsettling and familiar for Keith’s liking. The bright, sun-touched trees outside hardly looked foreboding now, but come nightfall...

It took effort to push the covers off of him, both because of the sheer number Shiro had seen fit to bury him under and his own bonelessly weak limbs. His charcoal grey shirt was soaked through and his thighs were sticky from where they’d been pressed together as he slept; cool air met the sweat-soaked hair bunched at his nape and sent a shudder down his back.

Somewhere, two rooms away, it sounded like the TV was on and someone was cooking. Shiro, most likely, if Hunk felt half as depleted and sore as Keith did. It smelled like curry, fragrant and warm and no doubt straight from a pre-mixed jar or package, unless it _was_ Hunk dragging himself around the kitchen to cobble together a culinary miracle out of their disorganized fridge.

Keith had to work himself up just to swing his feet over and rise up out of bed, and the trip to the front of the house was a pinball-like journey of staggering from one wall to another for support.

The open space that constituted their living room hosted a guest on the couch—Hunk, still snoring softly, arms thrown up over his head. He was covered with a massive quilt Coran had made them as a housewarming gift, his dark hair an unruly flop without his headband in place. He’d been cleaned up and bandaged, but still sported more than a few bruises along his well-muscled arms.

“Keith!” Shiro exclaimed upon seeing him standing there, clinging to a sturdy support beam like it was the mast amidst a storm. “You shouldn’t even be awake yet. What are you doing up? Why are you out here? Why didn’t you call for me?”

It was too many questions to answer, and Keith’s foremost thought was to ask one of his own.

“Hunk’s okay?” He looked to Shiro, an anxious thrum in his throat; he realized it was his heartbeat, rapid and fluttering and pulsing in time with the throb of his headache.

Shiro’s expression relaxed a fraction, like he’d been expecting something worse to come from Keith’s mouth. He abandoned the pot simmering away on the stove and crossed the room to scoop Keith up and make for the bedroom.

“He’s fine. I looked you both over last night and called Iverson. He and a few other rangers came by to check you out, but they didn’t find anything serious. Just bruising and exhaustion. Which isn’t entirely unexpected, considering you’d both passed out by the time I got you inside.”

“What about them?” Keith asked, though every word taxed him. He melted into Shiro’s arms, feeling as drained as he did after a week of fighting the flu. “The team?”

Shiro’s brow quirked. “What about them?” He glanced down and seemed to consider Keith’s distress. “They’re fine, Keith. Coran came for Goldie and Red earlier this morning, and I think he’s out helping for today’s search.”

“No,” Keith said, clipping the tail end of Shiro’s words. “I mean… what if it happens to someone else?”

“What if what happens?”

Keith drew his mouth shut. He pictured himself listening to his own story, the same way he picked through Lance’s fantastic tales; the details were murky, at best, and easily hand waved away as the panic and confusion of someone grappling with being lost in the depths of night. If he would doubt his own tale, then maybe there was reason to be skeptical. If he could find reasons for disbelief, then he had every reason to expect others would as well. By daylight, the whole thing seemed ridiculous—impossible, even, in parts and in whole.

They had gone up the Peak Pollux trail. That much was certain, corroborated by Iverson and the others who’d seen them off. Nothing had been amiss at first. They’d radioed in. But his memories grew thorny and nightmarish from there—the sudden dark, the missing time, the dogs’ behavior and the body of Florona Waterson draped in the uppermost branches of a blackened tree. They’d both seen her there, hadn’t they?

But Keith supposed that neither he or Hunk had gotten a close look. If pressed, he’d have to acknowledge that. He’d be gently reminded that the human eye looks for shapes it recognizes—people, faces—and finds them wherever it can. They’d bring up other incidents of panic on the trail, of campers frightened by the thunderous tromping of moose and the cries of deer, comparing notes. They’d caution him to be careful, because the higher ups would cut him loose if they thought such talk could hurt the park, and Keith was on thin ice already. He could already hear Iverson’s voice reminding him that _fear makes monsters of everything_.

Keith suddenly thought better of vomiting up everything that weighed on his mind from last night. He looked away, pointedly, fixing on a dark whorl in the woodgrain pattern of one of the floorboards. “Nothing. Nevermind.”

Thick, jet black brows rose in response. Shiro didn’t remark on the shoddy deflection, but Keith could tell he wouldn’t be letting that answer lie for long.

Keith grasped the doorframe on the way into the bedroom, throwing all of his remaining strength into gripping the narrow edge of pine. “No. Don’t wanna sleep. I need a shower.”

Shiro paused, swaying on the spot. “You should rest, Keith.” He already sounded defeated.

“I’m gross. I want to take a shower,” Keith insisted, a second of reserve of energy surging in on the wings of sheer stubbornness.

“A bath would be easier…”

“I hate baths.”

“I know,” Shiro sighed, finally giving in. He turned to the bathroom, careful to angle himself and Keith so no walls or shelves were knocked in the process.

Gingerly, he sat Keith down on the toilet and leaned in, his hands braced on bare thighs as he pressed a kiss to Keith’s sweat-slick forehead. “Wait a sec while I go turn off the stove.”

Keith waited. He peeled off his top, still grossly damp, and used it to mop the back of his neck before tossing it at the laundry bin. It missed by a solid foot-and-a-half, and all he could do was glare at the rumpled shirt where it lay on the floor.

“Think we’ll both fit?” Shiro asked as he came back, fluffed towels fresh from the dryer in his arms.

“We have before,” Keith answered, his head lolling back against the wall behind the toilet. “If we don’t, your giant muscles are entirely to blame.”

“Sounds like you’re getting your strength back,” Shiro observed as he began to strip. “Or your sense of humor, at least.”

Keith grunted. From his seat atop the toilet, he had a spectacular view of his boyfriend’s bare chest, still well-defined under a latticework of scars, and too little energy to do anything but quietly appreciate it. A tragedy if there ever was one.

“What are you thinking about?”

His cheeky tone made the corner of Keith’s mouth quirk on its own. He sank back against cold porcelain as Shiro hooked his thumbs and pulled down his sweatpants and boxers in one go.

“Mm. How much I want to suffocate between your pecs.”

“Jesus, Keith.” Shiro spared him a slightly concerned look as he helped tug Keith’s underwear free of his bruised legs. “The state you’re in? That could kill you.”

“Well. It’s been one of those days,” he replied, as dry as the lining of his throat felt. “Nights. Whatever.”

Shiro heaved Keith to his feet while the water ran, cradling him close as he tested the spray. When it was finally up to temperature, they both clambered into the tub and Shiro drew the constellation-patterned screen closed around them.

The water scalded along Keith’s back so _good_. It soaked his hair and drew out flakes of dead leaves; it made his numb fingers and toes ache in relief. Keith ran his hands down the sides of his neck and over his chest, eyes closed, and rotated in place to let every inch of him awaken under the heat.

Shiro’s hands danced around his middle, ready to seize him if he wobbled or slipped. When it seemed like Keith at least had his footing, and there was no danger imminent, he let his hands roam.

Basking in the full blast heat from the showerhead, Keith spared a grateful kiss against Shiro’s damp skin, right at the juncture where arm met shoulder. Shiro had, without complaint, accepted the unfortunate spot at the back of the tub, where the spray never fully reached and cold air slipped in between the wall and curtain. It was a sacrifice made so that Keith might reap the lion’s share of the warmth and the water, and he’d made it without complaint.

After this, Keith’s skin would be flushed an ugly, prickled red for an hour, and hot showers didn’t mesh well with cold, dry fall air, either. But at the moment, it was the sweetest feeling in the world, especially with Shiro beside him. The only thing better would be if he had some way to rinse his thoughts clean, too, and let everything he’d seen last night vanish down the drain with the dirt and stale sweat.

“So… do you feel like talking about it yet?” Shiro asked, tentative in both his words and his touch. Light, testing. Wary.

Keith’s brow furrowed. The steady beat of water down his back helped relax the tension he hadn’t even realized he was carrying in the taut cords of muscle between his shoulder blades.

“It feels like a bad dream,” he said. His mind’s eye felt like a fogged mirror, and the more he tried to string together the memories that surfaced first, the vaguer his sense of time and place became. “When you wake up and it— you’re not sure what you remember and what you only imagined.”

Shiro made a face as he worked shampoo and lather into Keith’s hair for him, careful of his textured carbon fiber fingertips as he rubbed circles across Keith’s scalp.

He closed his eyes and leaned into Shiro’s gentle ministrations. The effect was soothing, despite how his head still throbbed and steady anxiety left his chest tight. Keith’s heart churned as he thought of the other rangers out on the trails, lone hikers who might find themselves in a similar predicament.

“If I knew what it was,” Keith struggled to say. “If I was certain about it, I could _do_ something—”

“Keith.”

“But I…”

 “Keith,” Shiro tried again, insistent until he had Keith’s full attention. His thumbs ran back and forth across the high points of Keith’s damp cheeks. “What do you remember?”

It spilled out in a disjointed tumble, like the first pebbles that soon roared into a rockslide— twice, three times Keith doubled back as he recalled some new detail, some fresh realization. The uncanny nature of the darkness they had found themselves in, the way he’d been stricken by Red’s fear, the sight of what looked like Florona Waterson’s body hoisted high among the branches of a deadened tree, the missing time and the pursuit by something ominous and unseen.

“I’m not crazy,” he tacked on at the end, eyes shooting straight to Shiro’s for some flicker of understanding.

“You’re not crazy,” Shiro agreed as he ran a soapy washcloth over Keith’s skin, slow and featherlight over all the places where he’d been bruised or scratched during falls. The slight curve of his lips was tight, though, and his handsome brows were drawn together in plain concern.

“Hunk saw it all, too. He’ll— he’ll say it better than I can.” Keith’s lips pressed together, curled in between the bite of his teeth. His second wind was fading, and he appreciated Shiro’s supportive hold around his bruise-mottled ribs.

He let Shiro tuck his head under his chin and fold him close. Whatever else he didn’t have— answers, clear memories, the barest idea of what the fuck to do about it— he at least had Shiro, in the flesh.

Every ounce of power left in his body was poured into sliding his arms around Shiro and squeezing him breathlessly tight, wet body pressed to his skin gone chilly from the draft and poor shower real estate.

“It doesn’t feel real,” Keith mumbled over wet skin, his lips grazing the ridge of a poorly healed scar across Shiro’s chest. “Everything was distorted, even when it was happening,” he added, thinking back on the strange lapses in time and their apparent sprint across fifty miles of wild, uneven terrain in the span of hours.

Like a dream that had bled over the hills and down the mountain slopes, twisting everything it touched. Like that heavy, foggy darkness that had felt ill-intentioned and alive with a desire to consume.

“It was… hungry,” he decided, though the realization only left him more unsettled. He’d have been bothered less if they’d found Florona Waterson torn to pieces and gnawed to the bone. There was something worse about the state she’d been in—whole but lifeless, devoured but devoid of any of the obvious outward signs.

He felt Shiro’s deep inhale, and heard the shaky exhale that followed it.

“I won’t let anything hurt you, Keith,” Shiro said into his ear, faint above the noise of the running water.

Once they’d dried and dressed, Keith curled up on the armchair adjacent to the couch and waited for Hunk to wake.

Shiro gave him a bowl of warm rice and soupy curry, and Keith felt every ounce of hunger within him at once. The growl that emanated from his stomach briefly drowned out the sound of Hunk’s snoring.

Sometime around the end of Keith’s third bowl, Hunk stirred. And then he bolted upright, eyes wide and hair jutting in every direction. He softened at the sight of Keith curled just a few feet away, a bowl perched on his knee.

“Dude, you okay?” Keith asked as he wiped his mouth with the pack of his hand and moved to set the empty bowl on the coffee table.

“Am I okay?” Hunk asked, leaning forward. He glanced down at his front, apparently checking for mortal wounds. His wiggled his socked-feet and patted down his chest. “I mean… I think so? Aside from the fact that I’m starving. Oh, and I feel like I just pulled three all-nighters. With a hangover. And Lance singing showtunes through it all,” he winced, rubbing at his temples.

“Eat something. It really helps,” Keith said as he went to the kitchen to fix a bowl for Hunk.

Hunk frowned as he took the first bite, but if Shiro’s cooking was a little lackluster, it certainly didn’t slow him down. He occasionally glanced over the rim of the bowl at Keith, and after the third time he paused in scarfing down the curry to say, “Dude, please stop staring at me like that while I’m eating.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Keith leaned back a few degrees and turned his gaze around the room instead. “I didn’t realize I was.”

“Yeah,” Hunk laughed, nervously. “Like you were still hungry, and I might be next.”

“I’m just eager to talk, I guess,” Keith said as he wrapped his arms tight around himself, his chin almost resting on his knees. “About what happened. Once you’re finished eating." 

Hunk paused with the tip of his spoon still between his lips. Underneath thick eyebrows, his golden-brown eyes squinted. “Oh. What happened?”

“Last night.”

“You mean…” His brow creased with heavy lines as he stared at a point just to Keith’s right. “When we were at park central? For the S-and-R thing? For that girl who’s missing—” 

“Florona Waterson,” Keith interjected, his throat constricting tight.

“Yeah, her,” Hunk said, troubled. “Still no sign of her?”

Slick fear uncoiled in Keith’s chest. “You don’t remember?”

“What am I supposed to be remembering?”

Keith blinked. He leaned forward in the chair again, hands braced on either arm, his blunt nails raking into worn upholstery. It took effort— effort Keith didn’t know he still had in him— to keep his voice steady. “Hunk… why are you sitting in our living room right now? Why’d you sleep on our couch? How did you get here?”

He watched Hunk’s eyes widen a fraction, a sudden and fearful awareness replacing the drowsy, confused annoyance that they’d shown just a second prior.

The engineering student glanced around the cabin, bordering on frantic, the furrow in his brow deepening. When he spied his boots sitting beside the couch, he stilled. “I didn’t take those off… I never bother untying them.”

“Shiro must’ve done it,” Keith said. “We were both passed out by the time we got here—”

“ _Passed out_?” Hunk interrupted, throwing the quilt off and shuffling closer. “When? Why?”

Keith recounted everything he knew of the night before, and was almost grateful that he’d had a first run-through with Shiro. Hunk was openly skeptical and quick to question, and more than once Keith felt as if he was rambling like one of the loons that bought up tracts of land near his father’s desert cabin for doomsday prepping.

Keith waited in the ensuing silence— stuffy and uncomfortable— for Hunk to dismiss the entire thing and recommend he get help.

“Man,” Hunk squeaked, curling his thick arms tight around his middle and grimacing. “And I thought Lance’s stories were scary…”

Keith grunted and made to stand.

“No, no, not that I think you made it up!” Hunk said, waving his hands. “Shit, dude. I mean, I honestly don’t remember any of that, but I’m not calling you a liar. Something is definitely… off.”

“Off?”

“Yeah. There’s no reason I should feel like this,” Hunk said, his stare going distant and introspective. “I shouldn’t have a— a _ten hour_ gap in my memories. I shouldn’t even _be here_ ,” he added as he looked at the couch he sat on. “It doesn’t make sense. And that’s without even considering everything you saw.”

Keith’s shoulders sagged under his sigh. He pushed out of his chair and settled down beside Hunk on the couch. Their shoulders bumped, and Keith was taken aback at how warm he was. “Thanks. I— I just— thanks. And I’m so glad you were there with me, even if you don’t remember it.”

“Oh, hard same, dude,” Hunk said. He still looked tired, dark half-moons resting under his eyes, but he was already brighter than he’d been when he woke. “This is fucked up, but like… honestly? By the sound of it, I’d have been dead without you. Like… dead for _real_ ,” he added, all joking faded from his tone.

“Nah,” Keith said. He drew up one leg and hooked his arms around it. “I think you’d have been fine. Now, if it were _Lance_ with me—”

“Oh, you’d be dead.”

“We’d be dead,” Keith agreed, surprised to find he could laugh along with Hunk. When the moment passed, and silence thickened again between them, Keith added, “Shiro said he could drive you back to your place once you woke up. I’m guessing you probably wanna get out of here before nightfall.”

“Oh my God, you have no idea,” Hunk said, the words running together. A slightly abashed expression followed the outburst. “Uh… sorry, man. Not that I don’t appreciate the hospitality.”

“It’s cool. I get it.” He stood and went to the front door, where his own boots had been set beside the orderly cubby filled with Shiro’s shoes and slippers. He slid his feet in one at a time while slipping on his jacket.

“Do you?” Hunk tilted his head, dubiousness drawn across his face. He kept his eyes on Keith as he laced up his shoes. “‘Cause you don’t look like you’re ready to bail. Like… aren’t you freaked out? You guys are very much in the danger zone right here.”

“I’m not sure where we’d go,” Keith shrugged. He then had to sheepishly turn down Hunk’s offer to take shelter in the common area of his and Lance’s apartment. “I think we’ll be okay here, though. At least for now.”

“Alright,” Hunk drawled, reluctance weighing down the word. He groaned as he rose from the couch, one hand immediately going to a sore spot at the base of his spine. “But I’m going to expect check-ins. Call me. Text me. Videochat me tomorrow during your morning spooning session with Shiro or whatever, okay?” 

“You’re still on about that?” Keith snorted. He swung open the front door and walked Hunk toward the stump where Shiro was busy splitting firewood to replenish the orderly stack beside the shed. “Why does it matter so much to you? Wait… are you asking for Lance?”

“I just want confirmation, man,” Hunk shrugged. “He _is_ the small spoon, right? Right? I get _crazy_ small spoon vibes from him.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Keith said wryly. “You’ll have, oh, fifty minutes or so to fill on the way down into town.”

“Ask me about what?” Shiro questioned before lifting the hem of his flannel shirt to dab at the light sweat across his forehead.

Hunk was red-cheeked and babbling about everything _but_ the long-raging big spoon-small spoon debate by the time he was climbing into the passenger seat of the Jeep.

Shiro kissed Keith goodbye, lips light on his forehead, and bade him to go back and get some rest until he returned.

The notion certainly held some appeal. The backs of Keith’s thighs ached when he took the stairs, and there was a slight twinge in his shoulder when he moved just so. They were minor pains, but paired with the draining exhaustion he hadn’t quite shaken yet, it seemed an afternoon of lounging might be all he was good for.

Keith supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised when the texts from Lance came rolling in.

 _(14:18) Lance:_ so what’s this I hear about you and Hunk almost dying in the woods?

 _(14:18) Lance:_ also, tell Shiro thanks for leaving that part out last night… :/

 _(14:18) Lance:_ I’d just assumed the cell service was shit as usual and he’d decided to crash with you guys bc he hates driving at night

 _(14:18) Lance:_ Kinda shitty to know that I was wasting my life on statistical analysis while u two were running from the devil

Keith’s thumbs hovered over the keys.

 _(14:20)_ You believe me?

 _(14:20) Lance:_ believe you?? How many times did I tell u that ALL woods are creepy af? this isn’t some trusty bonding moment, it’s a fucking I TOLD YOU SO

 _(14:21) Lance:_ anyway of course I believe you. Honestly I’m not sure you could even make up a story like this. Minimal offense but you’re terrible at lying AND performance art

 _(14:21) Lance:_ Also Hunk is super freaked out, jsyk

 _(14:21) Lance:_ And Pidge is excited???

A text from Pidge came in then, lighting up a group chat that included the five of them.

 _(14:22) Pidge:_ Keith, I’m so glad you’re ok!!!

 _(14:22) Hunk:_ wow…

 _(14:22) Pidge:_ And I’m glad you saved Hunk, too.

 _(14:23) Lance:_ yes, thank god hunk had a genuine mountain man at his side

 _(14:23) Lance:_ also I’m never visiting your goddamn cabin in the woods again, jsyk. goodbye seasonal NPS employment, hello retail!

 

Keith sighed out loud.

 _(14:24)_ I’ve worked retail. It’s still scarier.

 

 _(14:24) Lance:_ … a solid point my man.

 _(14:26) Hunk:_ Sooooo on the topic of the near death experience I have zero memory of

 _(14:26) Hunk:_ at first I was like, maybe it’s dissociative amnesia or a fugue state or something, idk, really racking my brain for leads. Hallucinogenic plant pollen. But then I started reading about missing time and timeslips

 _(14:26) Pidge:_ Me too!!

 _(14:27) Hunk:_ It’s a doozy lol, multiverse jumping and shit

 _(14:27) Pidge:_ I can’t believe you guys would breach the space-time continuum without me :(((

 _(14:27) Pidge:_ My readings have been WILD lately and now I’m wondering if this explains so much? We’re talking about months’ worth of data I agonized over because it just made no sense given the recorded topography and mineral makeup of this region.

 _(14:28) Pidge:_ Honestly, I thought something was off with Rover… I’ve just been reworking his programming and recalibrating, over and over and over, but this opens up SO many possibilities!

 _(14:28) Hunk:_ I told you nothing was wrong with Rover… little guy is my finest creation

 _(14:29) Pidge:_ -_-

 _(14:29) Pidge:_ but yeah, if we could record an actual incident of entanglement with another reality??

 _(14:29) Pidge:_ sec, hot pocket’s done

Keith’s stomach rumbled again at the mere mention of food. He tucked his phone into the pouch of his hoodie emblazoned with a Seahawk—Shiro’s hoodie, once upon a time, before he’d finally given up on trying to reclaim it from Keith—and went into the kitchen to rummage for snacks.

He’d never had much of a sweet tooth—not like Shiro, who used to keep his fierce longing for sugar firmly in check through willpower alone. But he skimmed past his usual treats of salted peanuts and pickles and spicy corn chips and instead gathered up two brimming handfuls of Halloween candy and Oreos from Shiro’s hoard.

When he plunked back down on the couch and started peeling into funsized Milky Ways, there were already more text bubbles awaiting him.

 _(14:35) Pidge:_ What about Shiro? Did he see anything?

 _(14:35) Pidge:_ Shiro pls respond :(

 _(14:36) Keith:_ He’s not back yet. Probably still out grabbing dinner.

 _(14:36) Lance:_ too responsible to look at his texts while he drives. I can respect that.

 _(14:37) Hunk:_ dude, it’s literally The Law…

Keith fielded question after question while Pidge and Hunk bounced ideas back and forth for the next hour-ish. Lance grilled him about the noise the creature had made and spent a solid five minutes chastising Hunk and Keith for not thinking to record any video.

The flash of lights outside gave Keith pause. He caught a glimpse of Shiro through the curtains, his face half-shadowed as he fumbled to unlock the door.

The scent of warm grease and salt wafted in, triggering a visceral response that Keith was almost ashamed of. He sat up, full attention directed at Shiro, who simply went to the kitchen table and started unloading McDonald’s from an insulated bag usually reserved for grocery runs.

Five grease-stained paper bags, in total, and two giant cups. Three McFlurries were hastily shoved into the freezer to await their fate.

“How much did you spend?” Keith asked as he started picking through the bags. One was stacked with containers of French fries, and he clutched it up greedily. Guilt still lined his stomach—it had to be more than they could afford to be wasting on fast food, given their reliance on just Keith’s income and dwindling savings from Shiro’s work.

“You were extra hungry,” Shiro shrugged. His smile was genuine but strained, and Keith felt his guilt double in an instant. “I thought this would help pick you up.”

Keith hummed in gratitude as he shuffled to hug Shiro, while also reaching past him for the cup that looked like it held Dr. Pepper. “It will. This is exactly what I needed,” he sighed before stuffing a steady stream of fries into his mouth.

“Same.” Shiro smiled at him in between bites of a fish fillet and slow, thoughtful chews.

Keith raised his eyebrows at him as he bit into two stacked burgers and felt ketchup squeeze out around his fingers. “So,” he said, eyeing Shiro as he licked up his wrist and the side of his hand before going in for another bite. “We kinda blew up your phone while you were gone.”

Shiro blinked a few times. “Oh, the texts. Yeah, I saw them as I was coming in. Wanna catch me up?”

Keith swallowed down a mouthful of insufficiently chewed food and chased it with a gulp of soda. “Pidge plans on sending Rover to the area that I think we were when we saw the missing hiker. Apparently she’s been getting data from him that she thought was skewed, but it might be… something. We don’t know. Hunk mentioned, uh, timeslips? Multiverses. Like, crossed wires, except on an interdimensional plane. And Lance thinks it’s a demon because of that rumor about devil-worshippers using the woods for rituals,” he added, barely refraining from rolling his eyes.

After the last couple of days? He wasn’t quite ready to scratch off anything.

“It sounds like they have some good leads,” Shiro mused, looking out the window. He strummed his prosthetic fingers over the ankle of the leg he had crossed over his knee. “Will anyone believe that, though?”

Keith cracked an apple pie in half and finished it a few sloppy bites. “You mean Iverson? I doubt it. But maybe if—if Pidge and Hunk get hard numbers that show something is up. Maybe if Rover manages to record something. If we went there again, prepared--”

“And you don’t think it’s dangerous?” Shiro asked, head tilted.

Keith stiffened in his seat. “It is. But it’s dangerous not knowing, too, Shiro. There are people on that trail every day, and rangers, and animals, and—and I can’t just ignore whatever that was. I have to go back to work the day after tomorrow and cover twenty miles of woodland, alone, not knowing if something like that could happen to me somewhere else. I have to worry about who could be the next Florona Waterson.”

He nudged Shiro’s foot under the table. “And I’m worried about you being here alone all day. Jogging out there. Leaving--”

Keith choked on the last bit. He thought of how far Shiro had strayed that night, weeks ago, and what could’ve happened to him.

“I didn’t want to bring it up in the chat, but I was wondering if maybe… maybe this has something to do with what happened to you,” Keith said. He busied his hands with folding up greasy paper and used napkins and stuffing them into empty bags. Anything to keep him steady while he kept track of Shiro’s shifting expression, keen on any sign of distress.

He hadn’t thought he could eat so much, or so quickly, but Shiro’d had him pegged from the start. There was only half a container of fries left, which Shiro pulled from one at a time, and a couple of chicken sandwiches that Keith figured would keep for breakfast.

“Hunk didn’t remember anything, either. It was like a blank in his memory—like in _your_ memory. And the way time passed was different, Shiro. It could explain why you were missing for a year! It doesn’t make sense, otherwise—how you survived, how you barely lost any weight, how no one ever saw you in all that time. And if there’s something out there, something that can hurt people, it could be responsible for your arm, too. The cut was so _clean_ \--”

“Keith--”

“And it might be way you felt drawn out into the woods that night,” Keith continued, his hands curled into fists atop the table. He fixed on the scar across Shiro’s nose, dark and jagged. “If it’s something that—I don’t know—lures people in, it might be trying to take you back. And if we figure out what it is, I can _do something_ \--”

“Keith,” Shiro said, his eyebrows drawn up in an expression of pleading. He sounded as exhausted as Keith felt. “Please. Enough.”

Keith froze, eyes wide. “I—I’m sorry,” he whispered, horrified at the way Shiro continued to withdraw into himself, his gaze downcast and his large, mismatched hands folded tightly in his lap. “I thought… I thought it might be the answer.”

“An answer I’m not sure I’m ready for,” he sighed in reply, his hands going to cover his face, rubbing heavily across his eyes and brows. “Or ready for _you_ having, either.”

“Shiro?” Keith asked as the older man stood and went toward the bedroom, slow, running his silver and black hand along the stone countertop of the kitchen island as he went. He turned in his chair, concern bleeding into lowkey panic as he watched the retreat of broad shoulders down the darkened hallway. “Shiro?”

The house settled into silence. Twenty minutes passed before Keith found it in himself to get up from the table. The sun had already sunk behind the mountains, leaving the skies to the moon and stars. The woods surrounding the little cabin darkened, the shadows cast between them growing longer and darker by the minute.

Keith went around to the windows to pull the blinds and curtains shut; he triple-checked the locks on both doors and made sure his hunting rifle was loaded and close at hand.

They seemed like paltry defenses in the face of the thing that had come so close to claiming him and Hunk. _And Shiro_ , Keith realized. Shiro, who’d only been armed with a flashlight and his voice, calling them out of its path and toward the blanket-like security of their cabin; Shiro, who had saved them without even knowing of the threat that followed.

They’d been spared, one way or another. It was a stroke of luck that seemed almost out of place— perhaps the universe’s way of making up for the misfortune of Shiro’s ill-fated hike with the Holts.

But Keith didn’t trust luck to be kind twice—not after it had royally fucked Shiro before, and certainly not after such a narrow escape last night. In the hallway linen closet, there was a dented aluminum bat; he grabbed that, too, fingers tight around the worn grip as he marched to the bedroom.

Briefly, he wondered if they should’ve taken Hunk’s offer and run, if only for the night. But it seemed senseless— this was home, and had been for some time. It was the first place that felt like _his_ since his father had died, and the thought of abandoning it made his skin clammy.

He gripped at the back of his hoodie to pull it off over his head, casting his hair around his face in a ruffled mess. As he stripped down further, Keith let his gaze rove up Shiro’s sleeping form.

His boyfriend was stretched out on his stomach, arm folded underneath his pillow, face pressed into the center of the overly plush microbead pillow he loved so much. The soft twitch of his fingers suggested a dream— something gentle, despite recent events. What an unexpected relief.

Keith sank onto the mattress, already doubting he’d be able to sleep. At least not in any meaningful amount, anyway. Exhausted as he was, it wasn’t enough to drag him under. His thoughts eddied and swirled and bubbled over with realizations from the past twenty-four hours.

He was different than he was two days ago. The _world_ was different, at least from everything he’d believed to be true prior, and the facts were still being turned over and realigned in his mind. There was the tag-team realization that he’d either had a break from reality or reality was broken— no other options. There was the question of what to _do_ with the new knowledge he’d been saddled with.

Protecting Shiro was priority one, in this and every universe— since it seemed other universes might now be in play. He and everyone else who ever set foot in this wilderness would be better off, too, if they could only get to the bottom of what was going on.

Keith tossed and turned and stretched his legs until his feet poked out from under the covers. Every time the walls creaked from the wind, his gaze darted to the window, to the doorway, to Shiro’s slumbering form.

His prized dagger, passed from his mother to his father to him, sat on the nightstand in arm’s reach, like usual—but this night it lay unsheathed, and Keith contemplated its edge, gleaming silver and lavender. He’d never had to use it in self-defense before, in combat. His fights had always been fists and angled knees and ‘creative use of décor’, per Shiro, but what good were his scarred knuckles against the creature that had stalked them?

The ceiling fan spun in lazy circles above them, and Keith drowsily charted the rotation of the fan blades like he was counting sheep. Lying still, he became acutely aware of the aches and bruises he’d picked up during his desperate run through the woods.

On the other side of the bed, Shiro shifted, turning onto one side and wriggling until he was comfortable again.

Careful of the light sleeper beside him, Keith rolled over so they’d face each other. Breathless until he’d settled in, nestled on his side with a hand curled under his head, Keith considered the maneuver a success.

In sleep, Shiro looked younger, softer, the tight control with which he held himself during the day melting away to reveal a man without so many burdens. He looked—

Keith blinked at first just to clear his eyes, and again to make sure he wasn’t lingering in the fuzzy space between wakefulness and slumber. The longer he studied Shiro’s face, the further his uncertainty veered.

Shiro looked _off_ , and Keith struggled to piece together why.

It was something in the angle of his closed eyes, the length of his lashes; it hid around the corners of a mouth just a hair too wide; it was a nose that Keith suddenly noticed missing its slight bump from a bad break on their second date, and—

And it was unbroken, unblemished skin.

Keith lifted his head from the pillow, a breath catching behind his teeth. He leaned in. Without thinking, he cupped along Shiro’s face—skin cold as bare stone, breaths so soft he could barely feel them ghost over the fleshiest part of his palm—and ran his thumb over Shiro’s cheek and the bridge of his nose.

His skin was smooth, like it used to be. Like it had been before he disappeared.

The choppy tuft of hair fanned on the pillow looked an inch longer than it had only hours ago, and less shock-white; it fell differently, clung to Shiro’s forehead differently.

Everything about him seemed different, although only just. Still him, but not quite— cherry-picked from past appearances and woven together, seamless except for fact that it wasn’t how Shiro should look _now_. It wasn’t the Shiro who’d come home, scarred and more withdrawn than ever; nor was it the Shiro that Keith had first memorized inch by inch, learning him more thoroughly than the land he lived on or the stars he lived under.

“Keith?”

His voice was husky from sleep, his hair mussed from Keith’s fingers and pillow static. Half-lidded eyes pinpointed Keith in the dark, questioning.

When Keith blinked, he felt the dampness along the edges of his eyes, clinging to his eyelashes. The tears didn’t fall, but stung all the same.

He palmed Shiro’s cheek and felt the shapely bones underneath, his firm jaw. The pad of his thumb brushed over the space under Shiro’s full lips, just parted. And behind his ribs, Keith’s heart chilled.

“What happened to your scar?” he asked as he lifted his hand and dragged his fingertips over Shiro’s skin, still unmarred.

Shiro froze under his touch, as still and solid as carven marble.

It wasn’t quite an out-of-body experience, but Keith still felt a strange disconnect—a headiness that suffused to the tips of his fingers and fogged his head. Maybe it was his tiredness, his shallow breaths, the sudden and rapid staccato of his heart. Keith’s trembling hand trailed down, brushing the underside of the other man’s jaw.

He felt Shiro’s nervous swallow as it rippled down his throat.

“Shiro?”

Shiro’s dark eyes fluttered shut, the lengths of his lashes dusting bare cheeks. “It’s gone?”

“Yeah,” Keith croaked, his fingers tracing where it ought to be. He had to wonder if the other scars up and down Shiro’s body remained, their absence obscured by the covers.

Shiro shifted onto his back and draped his arm over his face, letting thick cords of muscle shield him from Keith’s view. He made a noise halfway between a grunt and a hum. “Fuck.”

“Shiro,” Keith whispered, recoiling to his half of the bed, but no further. He felt instantly wide awake, body thrumming in preparation. For what, he didn’t know— either to hold Shiro or hold him down, maybe, depending on what came next. “What’s going on?” 

The mattress gave and shifted as Shiro sat up, letting the layers of sheets and quilts and throws pool around his slender waist. The line drawn by his hunched shoulders was as stark and bleak as a mountainside in winter; the slope of his body sagged with something like defeat.

Keith propped himself on an elbow, and then pushed himself up to rest on folded legs. Shiro still hadn’t looked his way.

Keith shifted closer, every movement slow and telegraphed to keep from startling the man beside him. With uncharacteristic trepidation, his palm grazed Shiro’s curved back, then settled in to rub soothingly up to his nape.

The skin under this hand was degrees colder than Keith’s. As cold as the bare air in the room. “What happened to you while you were gone?” Another beat passed in silence. “You can tell me, Shiro. No matter what, I’m going to be on your side.”

A brief, joyless laugh shook the frame under Keith’s hand.

Keith despaired, retracting his touch until just his fingertips grazed Shiro’s bare skin. “You don’t believe me?”

“No, I do,” Shiro said, at last turning his head to face Keith.

His scar remained missing, and there were still the other inscrutable details that left Keith feeling lost somewhere in the uncanny valley. His irises seemed darker, narrowed, and the tiredness behind Shiro’s eyes was the heaviest Keith had ever seen.

“I don’t _want_ to tell you.”

“So you remember. You remember _something_ , at least,” Keith said, his eyes searching Shiro’s for something other than that closed, guarded look of apprehension. He made himself stare past the fragments of Shiro that weren’t quite right, willing himself to hold that stare. “Was it like what happened last night?” 

“No. It’s… I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m not sure you’d even believe me.”

“Of course I’d believe you,” Keith said, hurt despite it all. Because of it all. Whatever was happening, Keith couldn’t bear to lose Shiro again— was frightened past his wits at the thought he might be losing him _now_. “Even if it was unbelievable. I’m with you, Shiro.”

It was pleading, desperate, the way he pressed himself to Shiro’s broad back, cheek flush against the cold slope of his shoulder. He flung one arm around the older man’s middle, hand sprawled across his bare abdomen, and slid the other up in a blind, snaking grasp that found Shiro’s square jaw and frowning lips.

He turned his head, nose pressing against the ridge of Shiro’s spine. It felt more pronounced than he remembered it. “You can trust me. You know I’d do anything for you, don’t you? And nothing will ever change that, Shiro.”

Shiro’s long exhale cut through the silence. “I know.”

A metal hand snaked its way up along Keith’s forearm and came to rest over his smaller fingers. His prosthetic tapped fondly along Keith’s blanched knuckles before gently lacing their fingers together.

“You wanted to come with me,” Shiro finally relented, both of them still clinging to the embrace, like letting an inch open between them might cast them apart for good. “Last time, you made me promise. Remember?”

\----------

Low-hanging clouds slipped by, veil-thin, with the moon’s glow resting heavy just behind them. It made the shadows move strangely, cast to and fro by the silvery light that filtered down through barren branches.

Every step stretched Keith thinner. Behind them lay home, warm and beckoning, and ahead lay—

Something. Wilderness, sprawling and unknown, and a secret at the heart of it. Whatever Shiro was leading him toward. The dread rolled inside of Keith like a swallowed stone weighing a hundred pounds, crushing him slowly from the inside.

There was too much he’d seen in the last days and hours to dismiss as unrelated, and it all seemed to lead back Shiro’s reappearance. No, further—to his disappearance in the first place. To his long year ostensibly spent in the very same forests and canyons that Keith and hundreds of others trekked through daily. To the clean loss of his arm and the careful, _intentional_ scars left across his body.

Scars that could apparently come and go as they pleased.

A shudder passed down his spine. Shiro still hadn’t answered for that, but as they’d dressed in the dark, stilted silence of their bedroom, Keith had noted that the mark had returned. Still, the man’s expression had been like Lake Baku after dark: a placid, glassy surface that told nothing of what lay underneath. 

And now Keith followed Shiro— impassive, monolith Shiro, pale in his heather grey sweats, flannel shirt, and unzipped jacket— who faced the hollow bellow of the wind without flinching, the visible metal of his arm a silvery gleam that caught Keith’s eye with each swing.

Keith was strong by necessity, shaped by a life spent trekking across plains and traversing mountains; agile and sure-footed, his father had often teased that he must be part-mountain goat. He regularly outpaced his colleagues without even trying. But he struggled to keep stride with Shiro now, his feet never quite finding the same sure path that his boyfriend had.

Moonlight sank into the woods around them, between the almost-bare branches that locked and interwove some thirty feet above them. The ground was mossy and soft with the decay of autumn leaves, and traces of recent snow still clung to the roots of the trees.

Keith followed Shiro until he stood before a copse of trees blacker than the night, the ash-fine dust of their shed bark staining Keith’s tawny boots the color of soot. The leaden dread in his stomach plummeted to his feet.

“You don’t seem surprised,” Shiro observed as he glanced back at Keith for the first time since they’d left the cabin. The sole of his boot crushed dry, ghost-pale moss as he turned in place, sending up a cloud of spore-like moondust.

“Neither do you,” Keith managed, though his voice crackled as dry as static.

Shiro dragged his hand down the side of one of the trees, his metal prosthetic making easy work of the desiccated wood. He gutted it, exposing dry, rotten heartwood that seemed to drink up the moonlight and return nothing, same as a black hole.

“So you’re responsible for these?” Keith asked, sparing a half-second glance up at withered branches. They were dark against the star smattered sky, cutting across the Milky Way like spilled ink across a nightscape.

“Not all of them.” Shiro sighed as he stepped back to survey his work.

The tree nearest Keith let out a groan and popped like an ice shelf splitting. His head whipped to watch as a sliver of its trunk simply broke and crumbled into the air, fading into the wind. Keith’s wonder and horror met on equal terms, and the little gasp that escaped him carried both in spades.

“Shiro… what did you do to them?”

“Drained their quintessence,” he answered, as if that meant anything to Keith.

Keith held his fingers inches from the gouged and charred surface of the closest tree. It would erode away a week or less, he imagined, carried off on the wind like it had never existed at all. It was like solid ash forced into the shape of what it once was, and at the barest touch of his gloved palm, it dissolved. Like the others—like the deer across the trail—they would never quite return to the natural rhythm of decay and new life.

As he stared down at the blanched earth where roots met soil, where the mosses and twiggy saplings had been leached of color, Keith wondered if anything would ever grow here again.

“Quintessence?” he asked, trying to fathom Shiro’s use for the word. “Is it… something you need now?” Keith ventured. He registered Shiro’s nod, zeroing in on the white flush of hair at his brow and how much it reminded him of the void-black trees and the bleached earth where they took root.

“Yeah, and a lot of it,” Shiro said, the ghost of a grim half-smile shadowing his lips. “More than a few trees are good for.”

It was a vampiric sort of trade, then. Keith thumbed along the inside of his own wrist, thinking of that deer. Of Florona Waterson. “Do animals have more of it?” His breath hitched. “Do _people_? Do I?”

Shiro’s eyes brightened, but Keith didn’t like the gleam in them. “You’re off the charts, Keith. Not many people have as much as you do.”

Keith saw a trail of black dust curl past, tugged into the wind with the dark fluidity of a black ribbon. It swept close, and he felt the ashy mix settle into his hair. “Florona was in a tree, like this. And she looked like this. Did you—did she die for her quintessence?”

“I’m not to blame for her, if that’s what you’re trying to suss out.”

Keith wished that much could convince him. His throat stuck when he tried to swallow, and the cold winds that wrapped around him set him shivering. “How?” It came out weak. “How do you do it?"

Shiro froze, statue-still, locking eyes with Keith as he worked his jaw from side to side. Once decided, he stepped toward a lone, young pine.

Keith gnawed at his lower lip through the demonstration: Shiro’s bare hand along its trunk; the rapid withering, the nanosecond rot; the faint sounds as the life was sucked out of every cell and the wood turned dark and brittle.

And like that, Shiro’s eyes changed. Slow, at first, until they glowed faint gold in the deep of night. Their luminosity reminded Keith of the eyes that shone back at him when he’d pass a flashlight over darkened woods and fields— only there was no such light here to be reflected. Shiro’s eyes glowed all their own, a molten gold that set his high cheekbones in relief and changed the play of shadows across his chiseled face. The scar over his nose seemed even starker than before.

“Like that.”

The winds rose and something like the sound of the white nose filled his ears, as if they were back in bed where they belonged with the sound machine playing them to sleep. Keith felt miles removed from the cold rush of blood to his head, a thousand leagues distant from the adrenaline that pooled in his muscles and set his skin aflame.

“Last night, you were out there looking for us.”

Shiro’s expression turned. His gold-limned eyes made every blink that much more pronounced. “Because one of your rangers called and asked if you had made it home. They couldn’t reach you.”

“But we were near Peak Pollux, last Iverson and the rangers knew. Fifty, sixty miles away. So why were you out looking for us two-hundred feet from the cabin? Why did that thing chasing us suddenly back off when you found us? Why didn’t it just…” Keith felt the disbelief etching itself across his face. “Was it afraid of _you_?”

The ten feet separating them seemed both too near and too far, and the heavy, shadowed silence that hung between them was taut as a bowstring.

Shiro’s expression softened by increments, but the ghostly cast of shadows over his face remained. “Are _you_ afraid of me, Keith?”

In ways he had never known before, or even imagined. It wasn’t like him-- it wasn’t like Shiro, either.

“You’re… you aren’t...” Keith squinted against the stinging cold, staring at the other man through the dark hair that whipped across his face, blinking furiously as his features blurred and shifted in the darkness. It took time for the thought to work its way down to his mouth; it passed like poison being purged from his body, expelled even as it burned on the way out.

“You’re not him.”

Keith’s stomach knotted and roiled, but unfathomably deep in his chest, something lifted. It felt like there had been a vise around his ribcage, squeezing his heart and lungs small, and now it loosened for the first time in months.

Something in Shiro’s— or not-Shiro’s?— shoulders snapped loose, his whole frame sagging. Keith wondered if he’d felt the same release, that same bitter relief.

“Knew you’d realize it eventually,” the man who looked like Shiro sighed out. His brows pinched tight, his golden eyes squinting as he looked off into the dark.  Keith recognized the way his strong jaw shifted back and forth, teeth no doubt grinding. It was one of the things Shiro did when he struggled to find words— or to hold them back.

Not-Shiro watched him with the same forlorn longing Shiro did when they were caught on opposite sides of airport security, right before texting Keith that he already missed him. “I knew it from the start, that there was only so long I could… There’s something different about you, you know? You notice things other humans gloss over and forget.”

The world around Keith took its sweet time to stop spinning, everything at the corners of his vision a yawning, darkened blur. His surroundings settled back into place with a lurch that forced him to widen his stance and concentrate on staying upright.

“Shiro—” It came without thinking, the first name on his lips, always. Something buried under the bone and muscle of Keith’s chest splintered painfully; shards of it caught inside of him, lancing frantic lungs and an aching heart, the pain sharpening with every breath.

If this wasn’t Shiro— if he’d never really found him— then his Shiro was still out there somewhere. Still alone, still lost, still waiting. Keith had stopped searching, but Shiro had never stopped needing him. He’d never stopped suffering. He’d never come home.

The man standing opposite Keith had, instead.

Keith straightened, willing his sinew to turn to steel. “Who _are_ you?”

“It’s… complicated, Keith.”

“Why do you look like him?” He couldn’t even finish a breath before the next question hit, harder and heavier than an avalanche, whiting out his vision. “What did you _do_ to him?”

“Keith—”

“Stop saying my name!” Keith snarled. He felt his hunting knife in one hand, drawn from his boot without memory of doing so, and his mother’s dagger in the other. “ _You’re_ the reason he went missing. You did something to Shiro and now you’re wearing him like a skin, you fucking _monster_.”

Not-Shiro recoiled like he’d been struck by Keith’s very hand. “I know you’re frightened—”

“I’m not _scared_ ,” Keith snapped back, feeling acid between his teeth at the tinge of hope in not-Shiro’s expression. “I’m furious. You stole him. You lied to me. You _touched_ me. _You_ made me think he was safe again, so I— I stopped looking!”

He bit deep into his lip, until the taste of iron met his tongue. He lifted his arms and assumed a stance he’d first learned from his father, at some tender age he barely remembered, and honed in schoolyard fights and workout spars against Shiro. 

“You’re going to fight me? Really, Keith?” Not-Shiro asked, a stilted and uncomfortable laugh trailing behind. The expression didn’t sit right on his face, his features shifting as if they weren’t even tethered to a framework of skull underneath.

“I’m sure as hell not letting you kill me and wear my skin next,” Keith nearly spat. “No. No, I’m not letting you hurt anyone else!”

“Keith, easy,” Not-Shiro said, and that he dared to say it in Shiro’s gentlest tone only poured kerosene on the raging fire sitting in the pit of Keith’s stomach.

He lunged fast and low, all in on the attack, reckless with the heady, burning desperation of avenging Shiro. Keith closed the gap in a heartbeat before pushing forward to strike— and he got one, two, three good slices in before a hand broader than his face caught him by the throat and wrenched him back into the nearest tree.

The trunk cracked and squealed horribly as Keith’s back collided with it, a plume of powder-fine charcoal dust erupting outward.

“I said _easy_ , Keith,” Not-Shiro growled, his mouth hovering just above the shell of Keith’s ear, frigid breath drifting down along the side of his neck.

One hand was enough to keep Keith pinned, the worst of his struggling countered by the press of the cold body holding him. Keith spied his dagger lying in the pine needles at their feet, knocked from his grip at the abrupt collision with the timber; not-Shiro easily pried the bowie knife from his other hand and cast it aside, too.

Keith’s offensive had left gaping slices in not-Shiro’s forearm— dark but bloodless, and entirely ignored by their bearer.

“Jesus. I know the county hospital is bad,” Keith croaked, his hands wrapping around the metal wrist under his chin, “but even they ought to have noticed you have no blood.”

Not-Shiro’s jaw clenched as he spared a glance down at the wounded flesh of his left arm. “I don’t really have the quintessence to spare on small details right now.”

Keith grunted under the man’s hold, his nails raking uselessly over the unfeeling plates of the prosthetic holding him back. Those synthetic fingers were digging deep into the sides of his neck, and the pressure of a steely palm had closed his windpipe to a thread-thin gap. The next sound he made was a reedy, pained gasp.

The impersonator immediately loosened his hold by a fraction, though he kept Keith pinned tight to the desiccated tree; when Keith stilled, he could feel the gentle stroke of a textured carbon fiber thumb along his throat. “I’m sorry, Keith, for being rough with you. But if you’d listen—”

“Fuck that,” Keith spat as he twisted himself in not-Shiro’s loosened grip, angling himself just so— he yanked down on the prosthetic arm while hooking one leg behind the man’s calf, and then threw his weight forward.

It sent not-Shiro stumbling back a step, and Keith capitalized on it. He drove a knee up into the imposter’s abdomen, satisfied by the surprised grunt it earned.

He kept swinging, letting muscle memory guide the fury driving his fists. There had been a time where Keith wasn’t regarded as good for much else but a fight; and if there was a silver-lining to growing up as his own sword and shield, then it was that he could brawl with the best of them. He could take a beating, and he could give it even worse.

Keith connected once, twice, and then enough times to lose count.

And then enough times to be disappointed in the lack of retaliation.

Whether or not the bloodless imposter could feel pain, Keith didn’t know. But his own knuckles were beginning to ache and split, and a scarlet smear across not-Shiro’s jaw was the evidence of his own wear and tear.

Keith paused for a second, his tight, bloodied fist drawn back, and waited. He had expected claws to come out. Teeth. _Something_. Something to rake into him— anything to make him hurt in a way he could tolerate better than the agony currently carving out spaces in his heart.

When the blow didn’t come, not-Shiro turned his head a fraction, his quintessence-gold gaze tentatively seeking out Keith’s.

“You’re just going to stand there?” Keith questioned. A little of the tension in his drawn arm slipped away. Despite every odd and inhuman thing he’d witnessed of late, Keith found himself struggling at the sight of Shiro— or someone who looked exactly like him— cowed and yielding to every solid hit he made. 

“I didn’t-- I don’t want to hurt you.” 

“A little late for that.” Keith worked his jaw, gnawing down on his already bloodied lip. “You could do me a favor and drop his look. It’d make this easier.”

Not-Shiro shook his head, small and almost imperceptible.

That gave Keith a little pause. Somewhere, under the boiling hurt and rage, he’d hoped that enough blows would’ve at least broken the spell— released the imposter’s hold on Shiro’s memory and image, revealed him for the monster he was. 

“As if it’s not enough that you ki—” Keith faltered on the word, breathing hard. He felt unsteady again, feverish, his mouth dry and acrid as the soil of the grove they stood in; the rush of blood through his ears dampened everything but the racing beat of his heart. “You had to get rid of him, didn’t you? To take his place.” 

Not-Shiro’s chest swelled as he drew himself tall— taller than Keith ever remembered the real Shiro standing. His frown etched deep, just shy of a curled lip that might bare his teeth. “I didn’t, no. I only found him.”

“Found him?” Keith snapped, voice quivering as violently as his body was. He surged forward to push hard against the broad chest that looked and felt like Shiro, straining his arms, and managed to force the imposter stumbling back a few feet.

“Found him,” he repeated, throat raw, “and used him,” he said, shoving the not-Shiro back again, “and _left him_ somewhere out there to rot.”

He struck not-Shiro at the ankle and sent him sprawling, but strong arms caught Keith and pulled him down, too, leaving them tangled together on the blanched, leaf-strewn earth.

The fabric of the shirt under Shiro’s jacket—soft, well-worn flannel, a birthday gift from Eddie Bauer almost four years back, one that Shiro had talked himself out of buying it after carrying it through the store for twenty minutes, and Keith had made an excuse while Shiro waited in the foodcourt so he could double back and buy it—gathered in Keith’s fists, so tight he could hear the seams pop, one after another.

“Keith—”

“Fucking fight me.” He pulled upward, hefting the considerable bulk of the man— creature, _thing_ — underneath him, and then slammed him back down into the rocky soil. “Fight me!”

He traded the grip of one hand to throw another punch, and for the first time he _felt_ the connection. Blunt pain wrapped his knuckles as a sharper sensation lanced up his forearm, stinging along his bones. The adrenaline was fading, and the righteous fury that had propelled him this far now flagged when he needed it most.

Beneath him was Shiro’s familiar face, torturous to Keith— beautiful, lash-framed eyes squinted tight in hurt, his lips parted in distress, everything in his expression wracked with a pain that left Keith’s innards squirming with guilt.

For a few breathless seconds, Keith was horrified. His fist uncurled, fingertips instead trailing over the darkened, bloodied spots along Shiro’s jaw before he could stop himself.

It was his own blood, deposited by raw knuckles ripped ragged by the ferocity of his strikes, but like this—

On Shiro’s face—

“God, I don’t know what to do,” Keith admitted, his fingers curling along the jawline that was so familiar it ached to even look at. His eyes slipped shut, but focus lay impossibly far out of reach.

In his own mind, Keith felt untethered. Loose and lost, as if the earth that had cradled him for every one of his twenty-three years had suddenly vanished and left him behind. There was a scene in a movie he’d watched with Shiro that returned to him now, of all times— an astronaut cut loose from their space station, spiraling into the abyss of space, every hope receding by the second.

“You’re not him,” he murmured. Fabric slid free between the fingers of his hand as Keith settled back, weight resting on his heels and bent knees as he straddled not-Shiro’s middle; his hands went to his thighs, nails raking against black denim helplessly. “He’s still—this whole time, he— he’s been gone, and I didn’t even—”

“Keith, _breathe_.”

There was a hand on his chest, palm pressed over his heart, its weight gentle against Keith as he bent and heaved with frantic, shallow breaths. It wasn’t _Shiro’s_ hand, though, and Keith dug his fingertips into the soft underside of the wrist as he wrenched it away.

“You’ll pass out like this,” the false Shiro told him. Sounded just like the real thing, too.

Keith blinked back against the stinging tears that he desperately did not want to shed. And it was _hard_. The man beneath him looked like Shiro. He looked safe. There, coiled in with the revulsion that made him want to claw and rip until the thing couldn’t play at being Shiro anymore, was a sickly longing to bury his head into that familiar shoulder and cry.

The soothing timbre of his voice didn’t help, either.

“Keith, please.” Those hands touched Keith’s shoulders again—persistent, where Shiro probably would’ve chosen to respect his space—but ghostly light, as if ready to withdraw at the first sign of challenge. “I don’t like seeing you like this.”

“You don’t?” Keith asked, leaning further back. He wiped his nose down his scratched and bruise-ringed arm, holding not-Shiro’s gaze with tear-bleary eyes. “Why don’t you? You don’t fucking know me. I’m not anything to you.”

"I do know you,” not-Shiro said, simple and certain, and Keith wasn’t ready for the dark intensity in those eyes.

His large hands drifted to Keith’s thighs, loose in their grip, palms smoothing down along rugged black material. “When I found him there, when I saw you in his memories, I thought I knew. I could… keep us separate, at first. When I saw you and felt— felt like my heart started beating for the first time in an eternity, I knew that was him. Whenever I looked at you and ached, I knew it was because of him. When I made you laugh and wanted to do something stupid to make you laugh more, it was him.”

He made a sound through closed lips, half-amused, half-troubled. “Now I don’t know him or me anymore. But I do know _you_.”

Keith chewed on that while the fieriest parts of his temper subsided. The inferno in his chest turned to embers, leaving room inside of him for steadier emotions. 

“I could’ve been searching for him,” Keith said, filled with something deeper than the anger he’d left behind. He leaned forward again, hands curling into the leaf-strewn earth on either side of not-Shiro’s head. His shoulders quaked, and inch by inch he lowered himself to meet the imposter’s restrained gaze with a spiteful glare. “This whole time. You had me watching movies and sleeping in until noon when I could’ve been out there looking for him!“

“But you wouldn’t have found him.”

Keith stopped short, mouth still working silently. His teeth clicked together when he finally processed the jab. “Eventually. I would’ve.”

“How, Keith? He doesn’t even exist in this reality anymore—”

Keith had to admit that not-Shiro took the punch well. Unflinchingly, even, which was better than Keith could say for himself, as nerves up and down his arm cried out in raw agony. But there was only a hitched interruption in the imposter’s speech, and a brief flash in the dark of his irises that read like a snarl only just withdrawn. 

It was enough to give Keith pause, but far too little to stop him short. He grasped not-Shiro’s jaw in one hand, angling his face back toward him, his dark-tipped fingernails leaving half-moons on pale skin. For all the inscrutable, hungry looks and the irrefutable power resting in the body under him, Keith found the venom was missing. 

The ranger blinked slow, considering; the glint of his mother’s knife caught his eye. It laid not far out of reach, half-buried in pine needles and dusty, quintessence-leeched earth. “You said you found Shiro? Where? He was still… if you found him, then he had to still be… he was there. Whole?”

It was too much to ask if he was dead. It hurt to even intimate.

Not-Shiro visibly relaxed underneath him, shifting, perhaps glad for a question he could answer without fueling Keith’s ire. “I found him on the other side of a rift. Not quite whole, but still alive.”

Keith’s little gasp got carried away in the wind. _A rift. Not whole, but alive._ “Alive?”

“Then, at least,” not-Shiro cautioned.

“It was months ago,” Keith agonized aloud. He pushed his hair back, raking his fingers through until it drew tension across his scalp. “So, you… copied him? I mean, the way you looked when we found you— was that the state he was in?” 

“Missing arm, bloodied, everything else? Yeah. That was how I came across him.”

Keith nodded to himself, tongue darting out to poke along the rough slice along his lip, soothing the self-inflicted wound. 

“Alright,” he said as he pushed himself back onto his feet. He didn’t offer Shiro’s body snatcher a hand, but he did step aside to give him the space to rise. “Get up.” 

Not-Shiro looked to him with wary eyes, his expression and his movements as slow and guarded as a wild animal being freed from a cage. 

“You’re going to take me to him. To this rift, whatever it is, wherever it is. And if you do anything to Shiro—if you even _touch_ him again— I’ll kill you,” he promised, an ache in his jaw from the tight clench of his teeth. He snatched up his hunting knife first, and then his mother’s dagger, pointing it at the man to make his meaning clear. “No matter how much you look like him.”

Not-Shiro regarded him with a slight tilt of his head, his eyes—Shiro’s eyes, dark and stormy grey even under the yellow cast from the quintessence—moving incrementally as he took in everything from Keith’s spread stance to his borderline snarl to the glare off the edge of his dagger. His thick eyebrows lifted just as the hairs along Keith’s nape rose in painful apprehension.

Keith stood his ground as not-Shiro leaned forward, his stare fixed on the blade held out to threaten him.

An eyebrow arched as the man glanced up to meet Keith’s eyes. “That’s luxite, you know. It’s not from here.”

“Lux—what are you talking about?” His gaze flicked down to the weapon in his hand, then back to the creature in an instant.

“I couldn’t tell you before.” Not-Shiro eased back, still watching Keith’s hands with the wariness of a feral animal, and gave a half-hearted shrug. “That material’s from a world that doesn’t even exist anymore, as far as I know.”

Keith’s palm grew clammy and slick around the fabric-wrapped handle in his palm. Suddenly the blade felt fifty times heavier, like gravity itself was trying to wrench the last little piece of the mother he barely knew from his hands. “I can’t trust what you say.”

There was an ache to the sigh that not-Shiro let out, his broad shoulders dipping. He spared Keith a momentary glance—smiling but sad-eyed—before turning to face the wilderness spread ahead. “I know.”

“Good,” Keith scoffed. He shifted his weight awkwardly, internally debating whether or not to sheathe the dagger. “Lead the way.”

He didn’t want the imposter out of his sight for a moment, and picturing the way not-Shiro had hurled an axe through a solid slab of wood helped settle it. Keith tucked his bowie knife away, but kept his dagger drawn and ready.

It had been in either his hands or his father’s for as long as he could remember. The blade itself was a steely almost-lavender, and stayed cool to the touch even in Arizonan heat. He looked down on it anew, wonder and worry threading together. In all the years he’d had it, Keith had never even had need to sharpen it—his dagger held the same razor’s edge that it did when he was a kid, as finely honed and free of wear as ever.

“What does it mean?” he choked out after a few minutes of quiet walking behind Shiro’s doppelgänger, their steps muffled by dead pine needles and damp earth. “If it’s luxite?”

“That someone brought it here,” the false Shiro answered without preamble. He tore through wide, ice-laced spiderwebs without a shred of hesitation or disgust. “Wouldn’t be the first time something wound up in a world it didn’t belong.”

“How?”

“Same way I came,” he said, his wide shoulders flexing. “Rifts are rare, but they happen.”

That left Keith with twenty branching questions that converged on answers he wasn’t entirely sure he was ready for.

For a while, the cold couldn’t get a grasp on him. It was the slow burn-off of his anger, the simmer in his blood, that held the wind and ice at bay. But even that— even white-hot fury and the burn of betrayal— couldn’t sustain him through the long, dark night. When he began to shiver through the layers of long-sleeves and his jacket, not-Shiro offered him the dirt-stained hoodie off of his back.

 _Shiro’s_ hoodie. Keith had grit his teeth and snarled out a rejection before hiking the collar of his jacket high and resolutely deciding to power through the plummeting temperature on his own.

He quickened his steps to match not-Shiro’s long strides. He’d never had an issue keeping up with the real Takashi Shirogane; perhaps the length of the imitator’s legs had changed, or maybe it was just the way he moved.

The darkness made the path treacherous, even with Shiro’s doppelgänger leading the way. He kept one arm outstretched, reaching just shy of the broader man’s back. If it had been Shiro, he’d have held onto him by his elbow or the fabric of his jacket, clinging for security, comforted through a physical connection. As it was— with this creature that felt and sounded like Shiro, who wore his skin like he’d been born in it— Keith’s stomach turned at the thought of relying upon the imposter any further than he already was.

“So, you came through the rift where Shiro is,” Keith said after a time, his words overlapping with the distant shriek of an owl. In the empty silence, his thoughts had naturally gone to Shiro— the real Shiro, wherever he might be, whatever condition he might be in. “But he was already like that when you found him?"

Not-Shiro half-turned to spy at Keith over his shoulder— a thoughtful frown curved his mouth, pushing his bottom lip out in the same manner as the man whose face he wore. “I imagine whatever lured Shiro away also opened the rift, and used him to do it. After all, this is intentional,” he murmured, running a fingertip along the straight-line scars that radiated up from his missing arm. “Whether you call it science or magic, the process of creating a rift is costly.”

Keith felt his lip curl at the thought. He grunted in response, waiting until his breathing steadied before he spoke. “Someone did that to him,” he said, sickened to the brink of physical nausea. “And then they just left him there?”

Not-Shiro hummed under his breath. “Normally, rifts heal on their own, in time. This one hasn’t. Maybe he was thrown in as a means to hold it open.”

“So more things can pass through?” Keith wondered aloud. Cold sweat dampened his undershirt as he thought of the previous night. “More things like you?”

Not-Shiro almost laughed. “Things _much_ worse than me. And I doubt they’re as fond of you as I am.”

“Like the monster that was chasing me and Hunk.” The memory made his mouth go dusty dry. Though his worry for Shiro cast a long and deep shadow over everything else, Keith knew that the lurking monster in the woods would have to be dealt with in short order.

“Some hungry void-beast, probably,” not-Shiro agreed, offhand and almost disinterested. For as much as he fretted for Keith’s physical well-being, he seemed to care little about anything or anyone else.

Keith watched as the man ran his hand through the shadow-heavy boughs of pine branches they passed, letting the pale, ice-coated needles tickle his palm and spread fingers. The Shiro imitation seemed far more interested in mundane flora than talk of interdimensional rifts.

“You need a name,” Keith decided miles later, as the sky began to lighten in anticipation of dawn. “I keep wanting to call you Shiro, and that’s… just, no. So I think I’ll call you Kuro from now on. For clarity’s sake.”

“Kuro? _Kuro_. Hm, Kuro,” the man said, trying out the name. He grinned a little, slanted and uneven. “I like it. Thanks, Keith.”

“Don’t be weird about it.”

“I’m not. It’s just nice to have something of my own.”

Keith slowed, taking note of the persistent ache in his calves. He’d been blindly following Kuro for hours, trusting him to lead the way, and the miles of rough, unseen terrain hadn’t exactly been the gentlest route. “What was your name before you took Shiro’s?”

“Don’t remember. I’d been drifting for a while before I came across him. Long enough to forget whoever I was before.”

“Oh.”

“We should stop and rest.” At Keith’s protest, Kuro raised a palm and took on Shiro’s most authoritative tone. “You’ve pushed yourself hard. Take a break. Ten minutes, Keith.”

There was a mossy stump nearby, and Keith settled onto it with a weary groan. The past two nights hadn’t been kind to him, and though his spirit still burned with the need to find Shiro, his body was growing sluggish. At Kuro’s coaxing, Keith forced himself to down a dry ration bar and drink up as well.

“Are your hands okay?” Kuro asked. He’d fallen into a crouch, his thick arms supported on his knees; his fingers curled as he eyed the dried blood along Keith’s knuckles. Already, his eyes had lost most of their golden shine, leaving them Shiro’s usual deep grey.

“Fine,” Keith muttered back. He didn’t think it wise to waste good drinking water on rinsing his hands clean. “Just sore. What about your arm?”

They both looked at the dark gashes along the flesh of Kuro’s forearm. 

“It’s fine,” Kuro shrugged, peeling out of the jacket to better survey the damage. “I’ll fix it once I have more quintessence to burn.”

“No blood,” Keith mused as he nibbled on the end of a pine needle, thinking of the way his father used to hold straw between his teeth. He wondered at how much of Kuro’s human appearance was only skin deep. “So I guess you don’t need a heart to pump it. You just imitate the usual signs of life when you have to.”

Kuro didn’t reply at first. “Maintaining internal physiology that people don’t see is usually wasted effort. I noticed that you noticed, that night. I’d gotten so comfortable around you that I started getting lazy, and you pay attention to so many little things… things I didn’t expect you to.”

“Hard not to notice some of it,” Keith muttered. It seemed painfully clear, in hindsight, that something had been amiss from the beginning. Little hints, here and there, that he’d observed and ignored. Gut feelings he had quashed without thought. Keith shook as he exhaled, his fingers clawing back through his own hair, raking along his scalp. “Not that any of it clued me in. Fucking… fuck. Fuck me. I should’ve realized right away.”

Kuro angled his head. “In your defense, I think I was pretty solid at the start. In _my_ defense, you’re a tough customer and it’s tricky to keep consistent while quintessence-starved.”

“Quintessence-starved,” Keith repeated, nodding to himself. “You got colder as time went on. From lack of quintessence?” At Kuro’s not, he continued. “And that night, when I found you, you were warm…”

Kuro rose from his crouch, all six-foot-something of his bulk stretching tall. “I went back to the rift. The void in between words is rife with quintessence, and rifts practically hemorrhage it. One visit was like feasting after getting by on ramen for a month. It tided me over nicely.”

“So, do you even _need_ to eat?” Keith asked, thinking of the grocery bills he’d spent the last six months footing, the frequent stops at fast food joints whenever they were in town, the small mountain of candy in their kitchen.

“No,” Kuro said, ducking his head in the same sheepish manner Shiro sometimes used. “But it’s so _good_ , Keith. Especially sweets. Ugh. Can you believe I went most of my existence without ever tasting caramel? Buttercream frosting? _Nougat_?”

“Jesus Christ.” Still, Keith couldn’t help the little quirk of his mouth. “Well. You definitely take after Shiro,” he sighed. “I think your sweet tooth might be even bigger, though.”

Kuro preened a little, and Keith wasn’t sure if it was for the comparison to his facesake or the subtle distinction between the two of them.

The uncertainty bothered him. Not knowing Kuro’s motivations bothered him. Keith wrung his hands together, warming his trembling fingers. As dawn drew close, the forest around them twittered to life with the singing of birds and the rain-like patter of ice-melt from every branch and needle across the forest. 

When Keith pushed himself back onto his feet, Kuro was there at his elbow, hands poised to steady him if he wavered. The ranger shot him a warning glare— that his help was both unnecessary and unwanted— and stalked forward despite Kuro’s repeated pleas for him to rest awhile longer. 

“Why did you even come here?” Keith’s hands were shoved deep into his pockets, chilled fingers curled into ready fists. He studied Kuro as they trekked northwest, toward treacherous trails and crumbling canyons. Lazy or low on energy, the finer details of his form seemed… loose. Fuzzy. But the shape of him loomed large as ever. “Through the portal, I mean.”

“McDonald’s.”

“Not a good time to fuck around with me.” 

Kuro shrugged, absent in thought. “Why not? It’s not like I had anything to lose by it. New place, exciting opportunity. And it ended up leading me to this… idyllic, perfectly enjoyable existence. A rarity in any reality,” he added under his breath.

Their little cabin in the woods. The wind-rushed trees and mountain air, the smell of greenery, the milky spread of stars across the dark sky, their little garden that refused to grow. The quiet nights spent curled together on the couch, their messy attempts at dinner, all the mundane daily tasks of their shared, sheltered home. The ready-made life Kuro had slipped into and found rich in love and easy intimacy, which he apparently craved enough to slowly starve himself of quintessence. 

As the sun broke over the mountains to the east, Keith at last had an idea of what lay ahead. He could stare forward, at the tree-lined path and mountainside slopes, and march on to the hope that Shiro was waiting for him, still.

“Was it so bad?” Kuro asked. His gait slowed a beat, matching Keith’s for the first time since they’d departed. His inscrutable gaze lazily traced Keith’s face, searching for something, before trailing down his throat and the lean length of his torso.  “Being with me instead, I mean.”

That felt like a swift knee to Keith’s gut.

“Be honest,” Kuro intoned.

It was hard, when Keith thought of nights under the stars with someone he’d thought was Shiro, safe in his arms. The memories were clouded and conjured a bitter taste, now: lazy afternoons spent watching Seahawks games, their legs twined together; late night runs into town for ice cream and greasy fries; the welcome respite of having someone in his bed again to chase away the loneliness.

There _had_ been good moments. Too many of them.

“It should’ve been Shiro.”

The noise that escaped Kuro was unsurprised. Bitter, but unsurprised. “You know… at a point, it was hard to remember that you didn’t love me. Just _him_. Only him, and I had to keep on model for you to—”

Keith pulled a face, knowing it showed the disgust that gripped him. “Why?”

“Because you’re all I have in this world.”

Saying nothing, Keith watched Kuro pinch a waxy leaf on a low hanging branch-- still resolutely holding on despite autumn’s strengthening grip-- and rub it between his thumb and forefinger. The doppelganger seemed to be waiting on something. A response from Keith, maybe, acknowledging how dearly he was held. A reassurance that he occupied a similar place of value. 

“It’s a beautiful world, at least,” Kuro decided as he let the leaf slip from his grasp and continued onward, apparently grown tired of waiting.

It was, inarguably. Keith had lived his life on extended camping trips in lush forests, watched the sunrise over red cliffs with his father, hiked up and down the wildflower-lined trails of Yosemite, spent his childhood peering at horned lizards and bleached bones in the arid Sonoran desert. He’d followed his heart into the wilderness and formed a career on doing what he loved to do best. And he could appreciate that Kuro appreciated the same natural beauty he did, if little else.

“You could get out and see it,” Keith said after an indeterminable amount of time had passed in silence. The calls of morning songbirds were muted, the hush surrounding the two of them extending even to their muffled steps. “Once I get Shiro back, you could go anywhere. As beautiful as it is here, there’s a _lot_ more out there. Oceans and deserts and geothermal fields, coral reefs and glaciers. The aurora borealis. You could see it all.”

Kuro hummed to himself. His pace slackened again, and he fell into an easy step beside Keith as the path widened. “Any idea where I should start?”

Keith couldn’t contain a half-smile as he reminisced. “I grew up in Arizona, with my dad. As much as I love being here, I still miss it. I miss it like crazy. It’s… stark. Hot. All red rock, canyons, and big, flat beds of cracked earth. _Perfect_ for racing. The sunsets there are amazing, and the nights, too.”

“Sounds nice,” Kuro said. “But if it’s barren, I might go hungry.”

Keith smiled and uneasily thought again of the quintessence-drained trees scattered throughout the woods. “Oh. Right. Maybe a jungle somewhere, or something. I mean… so long as you don’t throw off the local ecosystem--”

“It’s not like I’m trying to,” Kuro said, soft as the wind’s rustle through the branches high overhead. Almost apologetic. “I don’t want to ruin anything. I just… do.”

The sentiment was relatable. Keith bit back his sympathies, though, and chewed quietly on thoughts of the havoc Kuro’s mere presence wrought. That he didn’t belong seemed readily apparent; Kuro’s love of their world hadn’t stopped him from gnawing away at it, drawing the life from the land and leaving only black ash behind. He consumed like a void-- a walking, talking black hole in the shape of a man Keith loved.

At a fork in the trail, Keith veered right without thought. The path was dappled with early morning sun as it filtered down through the branches, the pattern almost hypnotic. He was half a mile along before he realized he had taken the lead somewhere along the way, with Kuro ghostly silent at his heels.

Keith stopped and turned, and the broad shape of Kuro made him do a double-take.

He seemed… bigger. As if every dimension of him had expanded, no longer constrained by holding fast and true to the memory of Shiro. Taller, thicker, his scars softened and Shiro’s worn flannel straining around his arms.

Keith had to look up at an angle different from the one he was used to. “Am I headed the wrong way?”

“No. You’re spot on,” Kuro said, smiling as he edged past. “I told you earlier. You’ve got a sense for quintessence that most humans don’t.”

Keith breathed deep to steady himself as he followed Kuro, eyes on the broad spread of his back. He was conscious of the tap of his sheathed dagger against his hip with every step he took.

The way Kuro moved was different, too. More sinuous, as the veneer of Shiro’s military-ingrained posture fell away and revealed what naturally lay underneath. It was predatory, if Keith had to put a name to it-- the confident languor that only an animal at the height of the food chain could afford. Something a few rungs higher up the ladder than humans. 

They rounded a bend and came to a ridge that overlooked the tree-filled valley spread under them, and Kuro paused again and handed off a water bottle to Keith. His demeanor told the ranger that this was another mandatory rest stop.

Day had broken in full while they were in the heavy, dense shade of the forest. Clear rays of cold sunlight found them there on that stony ledge, still gold and orange as they spread over the tangle of bare tree-limbs. It was a beautiful scene made eerie by the slow, consuming crawl of fog down the mountainsides, and Keith felt weary at the sight of how many miles left they had to go. Past the valley, the earth grew pitted and dark where the greenery of the pines gave way to the sudden lurch of Daibazaal Canyon, lying just beyond the forest’s edge.

And when Keith let himself look on Kuro now, it was like a morning haze had cleared, leaving Kuro in sharp relief against memories of the genuine article. Larger, yes, but less solid, like he could shift and reform in a blink; Keith could swear he saw curling wisps of darkness just under Kuro’s skin, snaking along where blood-filled veins ought to be. His movements were just disjointed enough to suggest the truth-- that the skeleton framework underneath was more puppetry than genuine biology. And when he wasn’t animated, wasn’t talking, his expression lapsed into something flat and mask-like, the gleam of his eyes like inlaid stone. 

Dazzled by the sight before them, Kuro stood rigid-still, no longer even bothering to put on a show of breathing. Or blinking.

Inwardly, Keith struggled with shame that bordered on irritation. How had he not noticed before? How could he have _ever_ mistaken this thing for Shiro?

“What do you look like?” Keith asked in between measured sips from the bottle, now half empty. “The real you, I mean.”

“Tall, dark, and handsome.”

Keith groaned around the mouth of his water bottle. Even the inflection read like something that should have come out of Lance’s mouth instead.

“I was tall and dark, at least,” Kuro said with a slight smile. “To you? I think I would look like a seven-foot shadow.”

Half-remembered dreams resurfaced in the back of Keith’s mind. Or maybe not dreams at all, but memories. “Was Shiro afraid? When he saw you?”

Kuro shook off the question, the dark of his hair curling like smoke. “He was unconscious. Could still be. Time moves differently inside of riftspace-- oh, and outside of them, too. Reality bends. Time warps. Anomalies are to be expected.”

“Anomalies,” Keith repeated. _Anomaly_ seemed like a good word for so much of what had gone awry lately. “Like traveling sixty miles in a few hours? Missing memories? The time slips Pidge and Hunk were talking about—”

“Ugh. Those two are clever,” Kuro murmured as he rubbed at one temple.

Keith smiled despite himself, and the circumstance.

“Even if you hadn’t noticed... even if I hadn’t slipped up, they would’ve pieced things together soon enough.” Kuro’s eyes—Shiro’s eyes, down to the gunmetal grey irises and silky-long lashes that brushed along his high cheeks when he closed them—were fixed on the long slants of light that fell across the wooded valley below.

Keith watched the minutiae of Kuro’s expressions as he drank in the morning’s changing colors, the slow roll of the fog that slid over mountains and down into valleys and ravines. He traced the man’s profile, from strong jaw to straight, unbroken nose to tufted white hair. “It wasn’t just the scar,” he said, lightly teasing, tapping at his own nose. “I accidentally broke Shiro’s on a date.”

It made Kuro snort, nose wrinkling as he grinned. “I remember that now.” He glanced Keith’s way, dark eyes touched by the same smile before it faded like the last of the stars on the western horizon. “But I had been dreaming-- or remembering, I guess-- of a time before all that. A day when he was at this aquarium--”

“His fourteenth birthday,” Keith supplied, already nodding, knowing the story as well as if he’d been there. “With the baby Beluga whale. And then he ate so much ice cream cake that he threw up.”

“Yeah. A good day,” Kuro said, face warmed by a kiss of golden sunlight and his own faint, affectionate smile.

Keith watched Kuro and wondered if, maybe, a little bit of Shiro had stuck with him after all. Maybe it had seeped in deep and refused to be cast off like a shedded skin, because for all the inhuman qualities Kuro possessed, enough of him was too painfully familiar to disregard

Kuro watched the sun finish its rise with the same wide-eyed wonder that Shiro held for the heavens— and stars in particular. Ancient constellations and asterisms that he never tired of pointing out for Keith, galaxy clusters and passing comets, things unseen that he knew by some recent scholarly article or theory alone.

Keith blinked back a sudden dampness at the edges of his eyes. There was no particular swell of emotion to blame, no indication that there was anything more to follow. “Do you have all of Shiro’s memories? Every single one?”

“Not quite. Most, but--” Kuro’s expression turned embarrassed, a color deeper and darker than blood tingeing his cheeks. “I was overeager. I rushed things.”

“Do you remember when I brought him to Brewer’s Peak?” Keith asked. He watched the shadows recede deeper down the distant ravine walls, shying away from the sun. Light caught in the fog that slowly rolled between trees and down ledges, pale gold and pink and faintly shimmering.

Kuro’s grin was slow, wide, revealing the gleam of pointed canines. His eyes shut for a moment. “Mhm. He was afraid he was going to piss himself. And you, consequently.”

“It was the first time I took him on my hover racer,” Keith said, one hand loosely cupped over his mouth as he laughed. “He kept trying not to press against me. Didn’t know where to put his hands, either. I finally got them around my waist and they were _so_ sweaty. Fuck, he was a mess.”

“Nerves,” Kuro shrugged, quick to make Shiro’s case for clammy, awkward touches. “Entirely justified, might I add. I’m not sure which terrified him more-- being so close enough to feel your heartbeat, or hurtling over a hundred-foot drop.”

Keith hummed at the memory. “I might’ve… I _maybe_ went for a few big jumps just to make him hold me tighter,” he admitted, no shame at all. It had brought them closer, after all, in a couple of ways, and had soundly convinced Shiro of his piloting experience. Besides-- no guy who’d been on the fasttrack to space travel couldn’t handle a little off-road hover racing down the side of a mountain or two.

“It worked,” Kuro said. “It’s a powerful memory. Half of it is just my eyes shut, wrapped around your back, the wind stinging my ears. And the smell of you, your hair. The smell’s the strongest part of it. Cinnamon and pine soap and sunscreen.”

Kuro then busied himself studying his own hand, tracing metal fingers along the lines that stretched across his palm.

And Keith found he didn’t mind so much that Kuro was elbow-to-elbow with him, even here on the precipice of a two-hundred foot ledge overlooking the vale ahead.

“What I hate—actually, there’s a lot to hate,” Keith muttered as they began their descent down the rest of the mountainside, steadily approaching the reaches of Daibazaal canyon. “ _One_ of the things I hate is that under better circumstances, this seems like the sort of thing Shiro would love?”

He glanced sidelong at the man walking beside him and was strangely reassured to see Kuro nodding in absent agreement.

“Seeing new worlds… that’s exactly the kind of thing he’d lay there and talk about. He wanted to go the pilot route, you know. He did all these NASA summer camps, dual enrolled so he was taking, like, college-level astrophysics in high school. But then he hit another growth spurt and got a few inches too tall for space. He’s a little long in the torso,” Keith said, turning to compare his memories with the form of the man beside him, “so his sitting height was too much for the cockpit.”

“No height limits on falling into rifts,” Kuro said, chancing a small smile.

“Apparently not.”

Keith was grateful that the rest of the trek was all downhill: down the heavy slope of the mountainside, down the walls of the sheltered, fog-thick valley. It was a path rarely taken, as they often closed this area of the park due to rockslides and a history of flash floods through the nearby canyons. And as he stared up at the sides of the valley-- sheer and unforgiving, penning them in on either side-- Keith felt a steady thrum of apprehension.

Foggy haze persisted across the rocky, moss-dotted soil, swirling around treetrunks and lapping at their legs. The silence surrounding them was dense and full, but through it Keith thought he could hear--

 _Something_. It tickled at the edge of his hearing, like a song playing across a football field, the notes and words all compressed into a single sound. Its drone grew almost irritating, like the persistent buzzing of a gnat that couldn’t be shaken away-- and yet Keith found himself drawn forward, hooked by the inscrutable tone.

The trees thinned out the further they walked, and the rich earth eventually gave way to rocky soil that harbored only stringy wildflowers and tough-stalked grasses.

And beside him, Kuro exhaled, the sound dripping with contentment. “We’re close,” he whispered.

Keith’s jaw slipped open has he saw the yellow cast over Kuro’s eyes, deeper and brighter than it had been just hours ago. The fine details of his irises and pupils were lost completely this time, swallowed up in the brilliant gold of the quintessence.

“Lots of ambient quintessence here,” Kuro explained as he rolled his neck from side to side, flexed his hands, shuddered at the sudden intake of invigorating power. Even in full daylight, the glow off of his eyes was marked. “It’s _pouring_ out of the rift. Can you feel it?”

Keith bit back the immediate urge to spit a reply, quelling his knee-jerk reaction to distance himself from… _this_. With hands tightly clenched, he stared ahead and instead focused on what he _did_ feel. 

The hum at the edge of his hearing, grown stronger, the sound on the verge of clarion. The smell that reminded him of electricity, of nearby lightning strikes and seared ozone. The tight, nearly painful pull of the raised hairs down his nape, up his arms, under his shirt. The warmth of his sheathed dagger against his hip—

With a little gasp, Keith drew the blade and pressed his knuckles to its flat, polished side. It was warm to the touch, warm like something _alive_. As Keith smoothed his thumb along the blade, he could swear that from time to time he felt something thrum through the metal. 

He held the dagger close as they crept down into the canyon, Keith following Kuro down a narrow, winding path Keith had never noticed on previous visits to the canyon. Lined with boulders and tall jutting pillars of stone, Keith occasionally noticed carvings that didn’t strike him as belonging to any of the tribes that had ties to these lands-- that barely struck him as human at all. 

He ran his fingers across the jagged symbols as they passed, open-mouthed at the alien script and the strange glyphs, the tips of his nails cut ragged. A few even made him pause, his touch lingering over the stone with a fear he couldn’t name and didn’t understand.

He only stopped when the carven stone was overtaken by flora just as unrecognizable as the writing. Plantlife teemed along the canyon walls, unlike anything he’d ever seen in this forest or any other. Red, fleshy leaves spread in wide fans, budding from creeping vines the color of rusted barbed wire. He could almost swear the array of leaves angled themselves toward him as he passed, as if sensing his presence.

The plants only grew less familiar the deeper they descended—more animated, more bizarre, more unmistakably alien.

“What is all this?” Keith asked before clamping his hands over his nose and mouth as a nearby plant let out a burst of what looked like pollen. Keith _hoped_ it was just pollen. 

“This rift has been open for a long time. All the quintessence is beginning to affect its surroundings.”

“This… can’t be good.” Keith frowned as he followed Kuro’s suit and ducked under a mess of thick vines drawn tight across the narrow canyon. He had to swipe frantically through the clinging tendrils and unearthly flora that crowded the narrow cavern, and more than once Keith felt something slither around his ankle, only deterred as he forcefully twisted his boot and quickened after Kuro. 

Kuro, who brushed through the web of plantlife as calmly as he had through spiders’ webs, soldiering on even as Keith clung to the back of his shirt and stepped on his heels. Pushing ahead, all while the insistent hum that filled the tight, vine-roped cavern made Keith’s head swim and his mouth dry.

And then he stopped, and Keith found himself pressed to the broad, unmoving bulk of the creature shaped like Shiro. And just ahead lay the rift.

Settled deep into the jagged cavern stone and taller than even Kuro, the rift’s surface shimmered and rippled like golden mercury. The center was difficult to look at, head-on; it burned bright as the sun, pulsing with energy, calling with that same droning note that quintessence seemed to sing. Around it, light and quintessence peeled off in wisps, like the arms of a spiral galaxy.

It might’ve been beautiful, if Keith could stand to look at it without picturing Shiro trapped on the other side. If the carved script around its edges didn’t read so ominous and unfamiliar.

Kuro’s hand settled at the base of his neck, firm against his spine, and Keith was grateful for the steadying touch. The rift’s song quieted, letting Keith’s thoughts run clear again.

“Thanks for leading me this far.” Keith could feel the swell in his lungs and the shake in his legs. This close to the rift, he couldn’t even feel the knife-edged mountain cold anymore.

And he missed it-- that cold wind that recalled nights spent sitting under the stars with Shiro, warmed by hot cocoa and kisses. Like he’d miss the earth solid under his feet, where home was-- the same earth his father had walked, and his mother, too, though he’d never known her.

“I’m going with you, obviously,” Kuro said, interrupting Keith’s thoughts. Irritation was written in the faint creasing around his golden eyes. “I can’t underline enough how obvious that should have been. Like I’d let you get lost in the void--”

“Well, fuck, I don’t know,” Keith huffed, his shoulders curled in defensively as he crossed his arms over his middle. “I figured you wouldn’t want to go back in.”

“I don’t,” Kuro said. He turned back, looking down the cavern pass they’d come through-- between the vines, there was the narrowest glimpse of pale, sun-washed stone and crisp air. Their last, fleeting look at the world left behind, from foam-whipped river to cirrus-streaked skies. “But where you go, I’ll follow.”

“In this very specific instance, that’s... actually comforting.” After some thoughtful lip-gnawing, he uncrossed his arms and slipped a hand around Kuro’s bicep instead. For everything Kuro was and wasn’t, Keith was grateful to have someone at his side. For all he knew, not one of them might make it back. “Thanks. Kuro.”

Keith lifted his other hand to the shimmering, golden surface of the portal. Energy hummed from it, as faintly audible as ever, but even more as a sensation. It was the static crackle against his palm, almost enough to sting. It was in the air around them, warm and heavy and sticking along the inside of his mouth.

Shiro was somewhere on the other side. Keith could feel it, as certainly as he knew the weight of his father’s touch, the reassuring presence of his friends, the unconditional love Shiro had given him. It was as real and definite as the warm metal of his dagger against his thigh.

And Keith was going to bring him home.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This grew out of control a little bit, but I had a good time while writing it. I hope it was as fun to read! Or, interesting? Fun might not be the greatest word for it. This was where I planned on ending this, but for anyone who wants to know how stuff pans out/have a definitively happier ending, I’m gonna add a quick, optional little epilogue in a day or two. :)
> 
> If you like silly fluff, read my other sheith fics! Find me on tumblr at @neyasochi and twitter @valsaann.


	5. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> one year after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not necessary reading, but I really wanted at least moment in this universe where Shiro gets to be happy and Keith gets to have him back-- some romantic garbage ahead.

“Careful,” Keith murmured to himself as he placed a small mug filled nearly to the brim on the side table next to Shiro, in the small sliver of space that wasn’t occupied by enormous tomes on everything from physics to astral projection. Keith’s interest in tea began and ended with tall cans of Arizona, but the high-quality matcha had been a gift from Shiro’s parents on their last visit; he’d snuck a little taste before carrying it to the living room and found it just as bitter and unappealing as the last time he'd tried it.

Shiro startled back to some semi-alertness at the gentle clink of ceramic on glass, shifting under his blanket cocoon. His glasses had slipped off his nose and fallen on the keyboard of his dead laptop. After a few bleary blinks, he went for the tea like it was the first Cadbury egg of spring on the grocery store shelves.

“Thank you,” Shiro mumbled, with a sheepish smile that made Keith feel as steamed as the mug of matcha. He rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his palm in between sips. “I did it again. What time is it?”

“Almost two,” Keith answered with a fond, if slightly exasperated, smile.

“Shit.” Shiro huffed a few breaths out to cool the tea and then sipped it down, casting Keith apologetic glances all the while.

“Didn’t want you messing up your shoulder again,” Keith explained from where he was leaned against the armchair. “Else I’d let you sleep out here.”

“Getting old is hard,” Shiro said as he downed the last of the matcha and sank back into the sofa, his eyes slipping shut. He moaned. “I’m falling apart, Keith. I used to pull long nights all the time. Hell, I could party until three and still make it to class at eight…”

Keith tried not to roll his eyes at the dramatics of it. He crossed the few feet separating them and leaned over the couch. Lightly, he tapped at each of Shiro’s fine, shapely cheeks in turn, gently patting out a rhythm. “Got news for you, buddy. It wasn’t good for you then, either. I think your body’s taking its revenge for your college years.”

“Feels like it,” Shiro yawned, stretching out his limbs. He then stuck his arms up and out, toward Keith, his eyes still closed. “Carry me to bed?”

Keith grasped along Shiro’s wrist, considering. “Fireman or bridal style?”

One of Shiro’s eyes cracked open then, paired with a loose, sleepy smile. “Kidding. Not going to make you drag me.”

“Uh? I can carry you,” Keith said, fully prepared to demonstrate that fact. “I could _bench_ you.”

“I know,” Shiro said as he closed his laptop and pushed the blankets aside before rising from the couch and knocking his shins into the coffee table. He let Keith steady him, each of them holding each other gently along the elbows, clinging close. “I know. My strong, strong Keith.”

Shiro aimed a kiss at Keith’s forehead but missed, coming dangerously close to landing it right on top of an eye. There was another little stumble as he toed his slippers back on, and then another as he made for the hall. “I’m gonna nod off at my desk again. I can feel Allura’s judgment already…”

He was in just his boxers and a faded, too-tight shirt from one of the last NASA camps he’d attended. And those fuzzy blue kitty slippers— a hideous gift from Lance that Keith belatedly wished he’d burned during Shiro’s long absence.

“You can just take the day off,” Keith reminded him as he trailed Shiro down the hall to the bedroom. From behind, he appreciated the width of Shiro’s shoulders and the way they tapered to his slim waist; the curves of strong thighs; the little mole at his nape. “ _Please_ take a day off. Coran and Allura won’t mind.”

Shiro grunted, skeptical.

“You’ve been working around the clock,” Keith said as he followed Shiro to his side of the bed.

After toeing off the slippers, Shiro turned to find Keith standing right behind him, so close that their chests touched as they breathed. His eyebrows arched, tongue working against the inside of his cheek. “I thought we settled this dispute years ago? Right side’s mine.”

“Just get in the bed, Takashi,” Keith murmured as he slid his fingers under the hem of the shirt originally meant for a Shiro two sizes smaller. Up and up, he pulled until it eventually came loose over Shiro’s head, the tight collar thoroughly mussing his black-and-white hair.

On command, Shiro fell back onto the mattress, arms stretching across the unmade bedspread. Amber light from the single lantern sitting on the nightstand highlighted the planes of his face and gorgeous slivers of his body; the rest of him was bathed in warm, soft darkness. With a sleepy sigh, he wriggled deeper into the plush, down-stuffed duvet and made himself comfortable.

There wasn’t a hope for Keith once Shiro lazily parted his bare, scar-wrapped legs and beckoned him in. Keith followed him down onto the bed, settling himself on top of Shiro and kissing his way across his chest— reverent over silky skin and raised scar-tissue, eager as he gently nipped at dark nipples and the hollow dip along his collar bone.

Under him, Shiro moaned. His thighs spread a little wider as his body bowed up into Keith’s touch, hungry for contact even as a tiny little yawn slipped free in between his encouraging murmurs.

Keith worshipped Shiro like it might be the last time, every time. That wasn’t to say he’d taken him granted before— Keith had always been acutely and perpetually aware of the possibility of Shiro leaving his life, same as everyone else had— but there was no denying that the long separation had cast their remaining time together in a new light.

Keith had lost him twice— first to the woods, and then to the rift— and it had left him more vulnerable and vigilant than ever. He’d lost Shiro, and rescued him from a terrifying abyss of light and shimmering gold, and Keith could say with certainty that he would rend apart everything that stitched this world together if it meant keeping Shiro safe, in his arms, where he belonged. They had earned their reunion through suffering and perseverance, and Keith treasured every moment to follow.

Like the feel of Shiro as he twitched and flexed under Keith’s hands, every inch of him aching to be touched. How he murmured Keith’s name, low and breathy and sweet, and tenderly pushed back the sweaty locks of hair that clung to Keith’s face. The heaving of his broad chest as Keith languidly worked him open, his free hand stroking up Shiro’s sensitive, ticklish sides to make him shudder. The desire in his dark eyes, bordered by those lush lashes that fluttered so prettily every time Keith glided over the right spot.

Keith savored the crushing squeeze of Shiro’s thighs as he fucked into him, slow and even until the last of Keith’s patience left him and his desperate rutting had Shiro grasping at the headboard behind him, all frantic encouragement and soft groans. He took no small amount of pride in the sight of Shiro flushed and sweat-plastered, lower lip bitten rosy.

Completely satisfied and thoroughly exhausted, Shiro slipped into slumber without even turning on the white noise machine beside him. He didn’t snore, but there was a wheeze through his nose with every exhale.

With a fond smile, Keith smoothed back the white hair stuck against Shiro’s damp forehead and pressed a kiss between his brows, and then another against his temple. While Shiro mouthed something in his sleep, Keith set about carefully removing his prosthetic arm for the night. His touch lingered on the forest of scars along the man’s amputated arm.

Unlike Kuro’s, these were constant and unchanging— and that proved its own problem. They had weighed on Shiro like a net of lead, at first, their effects sinking far deeper than skin. On a visit to the dermatologist, the doctor had given him a glossy pamphlet on laser scar removal. Shiro had looked it over, again and again, in the weeks that followed.

More than once, Keith had stumbled in on him carefully examining himself in the bathroom mirror, brow furrowed at his own reflection; peering over his shoulder, arm contorted to feel at the edges of long scars that crisscrossed his back; working anti-scarring cream into every inch of marked skin. Shiro had asked Keith— late at night, and mid-afternoon, and even on the way to get groceries— what he thought of this scar or that one. Whether or not he should go shirtless. If the scar across his nose was _distracting_.

Keith made his opinions on the matter clear— through tireless action and reassurances mumbled against Shiro’s skin— and soon enough, Shiro had stopped asking. Keith had no reservations about supporting his boyfriend in whatever he decided, but the quiet confidence that gradually replaced the worst of Shiro’s physical insecurity was well-deserved either way.

And now, in the soft dark of their bedroom, Keith lifted Shiro’s scarred wrist and kissed his curled fingers, the plain silver band he wore, the flat back of his square hand, grinning to himself as Shiro again muttered something unintelligible in his sleep. Keith thumbed over the pulse along his wrist bones, grateful for it. He held Shiro’s hand and considered just how lucky he was to do so again, after being held worlds apart.

Keith laid close beside Shiro, their fingers still loosely entwined, and fell asleep to the deep breaths and steady heart he’d always known.

And when he dreamed, it was of a blinding light that he might’ve once mistaken for heavenly, in a place where the air had filled his mouth like static cotton and crackled its way into his lungs.

Shiro dreamed of it, too— more often, and his dreams often segued into long nightmares that woke Keith with his trembling. Sometimes they even dreamed of the rift together, and when they woke it was to share a knowing look that needed no other accompaniment.

Time in that place had affected them in ways barely understood. Even now— even here, in the cozy familiarity of home, and with the rift long sealed— Keith sometimes felt that same inscrutable call. That distant and insistent hum of living energy that resurged only when it was absolutely silent. Only when Shiro wasn’t there to sense it, too, and loop his arms around Keith to hold him close as they waited out the strange pull to the unreachable place that had taken so much from them.

And in those moments, Keith tried to assure himself that it couldn’t reach them, either. Couldn’t empty any more horrors into their world nor draw them back into it. That rune-circled rift was closed, for good, and with Kuro on the other side of it—

Keith squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to think about that part.

It rarely worked.

Keith thought of him often, if not daily, and knew Shiro did, too. They still had to take moments to stop and untangle the past whenever Keith referenced some conversation Shiro had no recollection of, some movie he hadn’t seen, before belatedly realizing it had been Kuro he’d made the memory with. Even something as simple as fixing their morning coffees called him to mind, and Keith had to ask.

“What do you think he’s doing right now?” If he was still alive. If he could be called a living thing to begin with. It was the same chain of questions Keith found himself asking when he was wandering the woods alone, in places still heavy with the memory of scorched-earth trees and grisly, blackened husks.

Shiro watched him for a moment, considering. He tapped his stirring spoon against the rim of the oversized novelty mug Matt had gotten him. “Not a lot to do in there.”

Keith had only wandered an hour in the bright, hazy void that lay behind the rift— or what felt like an hour, as time apparently held less meaning and constancy in the quintessence-laden space between realities. The very air had sparked electric across the roof of his mouth, shocking him with every breath, and he’d drifted through it with all the agency of a mariner lost at sea. Lost, but for Kuro pressing him onward.

And Shiro…

Shiro had endured it for _months_ , at the very least, as best they could figure. He knew what it was like to be trapped in that golden abyss, longing for a world out of reach. He knew the primordial fear of the behemoth shadows that moved at the periphery, their exact forms obscured by the dense shimmer of light and particles.

“Thinking of you, I would imagine,” Shiro said, finally. He smiled after, but it was a rote thing—a reflex to reassure Keith while his mind revisited his lonesome captivity in that place. “If he’s anything like me.”

\-   -- - ----- --- ----- -- - --- -   - -

“Hey, van Helsing,” Lance whispered, planting an elbow in Keith’s side. Around them, the visitor’s center hummed with chatter. “I’ve got a lead on another trespasser in the park.”

Keith glared at him over the rim of his paper cup from the break room. “Stop calling me that.”

Lance glanced back over each shoulder while he pretended to straighten out a stack of flyers, as subtle in secrecy as he was in flirting. “I overheard some woman talking about a shadowy figure in the Olkari Grove. Said it was hanging around up the hill, watching them, which is like... Creep City. Anyway, Pidge has Rover checking the area’s quintessence readings right now.”

Keith sipped on his watered-down hot chocolate and mulled that over. “But it didn’t go after her?”

Lance shrugged. “Lived to tell the tale, so it must not’ve.”

Keith hummed. It hardly sounded like the other rift-creatures they had encountered— starved for quintessence and eager to sap the life of any creature unfortunate enough to cross paths with them.

Still, Keith didn’t like the sound of it. As monstrous as the shadowy denizens of the void could be (and they were, in all manner, monstrous— often multi-limbed and many-mouthed, horrific and amorphous composite creatures) Keith still found that the worst were the few that decided to approximate human form.

Maybe Kuro had been exceptionally gifted. Maybe he was a breed apart from whatever else had slunk through the rift on his heels. His imitation of Shiro had been _flawless_ compared to the uncanny monsters that had been stumbling out of the woods in the months following Shiro’s rescue—proportions skewed all wrong, features a sloppy blend of whatever humans they had glimpsed, too much of them still clearly alien.

“Hunk wants everyone over for dinner soon, by the way. He’s in one of those moods, y’know? All he can talk about is roasting a turkey. You and Shiro will come, won’t you?”

“A free meal?” Keith asked, brows raised high. “Not from frozen? Count us in. You want us to bring anything?”

Lance eyed him, clearly giving the innocuous question some heavy thought. “Everyone else is making a dish, but… you guys can just bring some bread. Store bought,” he clarified, with urgency. “And no Wonderbread. Or weird paleo protein bread. I am _begging_ the two of you to pick something normal for once.”

“Rude,” Keith commented. After a moment’s reflection, he tilted his head to the side and had to admit that their shared track-record for dinner affairs wasn’t the strongest. “But fair. Is Hunk making pie? Shiro’d kill me if I didn’t request pumpkin on his behalf.”

Lance nodded. “Already got him covered. Like Shiro, I am a man of taste.”

“Cool. Well, keep me posted on what Pidge finds out. I’ve got to restock the first-aid shack up on Redcat Rise. I’ll text you guys when I get home,” he said with a little wave.

“Cool. Don’t get body-snatched.”

Keith flashed him a thumbs-up as he backed out of the visitor’s center and gathered the necessary supplies, shouldering the weighty pack across strong shoulders.

It was a mild day, for winter. Most of the park’s more treacherous roads had been closed off well before the first heavy snows, limiting the majority of the visitor traffic to tamer portions of the forest— far, far from the desolate trail Keith currently walked.

The ground under his feet was solid with freeze, and topped with a fresh foot of untouched snow. His boots were the first to leave prints, and the wet, muted crunch of his steps was the only sound as the birds fell silent on his approach.

Halfway up the trail, Keith froze.

By now, the sensation was familiar, if still as hair-raising as ever. His hand went immediately to curl around the grip of his dagger, withdrawing it just an inch as he waited for some sign of attack. Luxite was, he’d found, incredibly effective in slaying the shadowy creatures from the rift.

Keith waited, until time and the bitter cold halfway managed to convince him that he’d imagined the feeling.

He reached the first-aid outpost and unloaded his pack, refilling bins with gauze and sterile needles and checking the stock of disinfectant and other basics. The only sound outside of his own steady work was the wind against the walls of the tiny, one-room shack, howling as it scrabbled across the wooden boards and worked its way through whistling gaps.

And Keith almost forgot about that moment on the trail— until he caught the barest glimpse of a curling wisp of darkness out of the corner of the shack’s lone window, the sinuous shadow slipping away between the trees so quickly it might’ve been mistaken for nothing at all.

\-  --   -- ----- -- ---- - ---- --   - -

In the dimming daylight, the forest turned soft. Twilight put Keith on high alert for deer and elk and other wildlife, so quick to bound across the lonesome road home. His discerning eye roved the treeline for other creatures, too, tracking back over points of heavy shadow until he was certain nothing lurked in waiting.

Keith’s pickup shuddered underneath him as he made his way up the dirt-and-gravel drive, and his gloved hands tightened around the rough, splitting leather of the steering wheel. The truck was only just beginning to warm up as he arrived home, and Keith wondered why he even bothered wrestling with the controls in the first place.

The headlights flashed across the front of the house as he turned, catching on Shiro, who gave him a glinting little wave with his prosthetic arm. Shiro, who leaned in the open frame of the front door, his arms crossed as he watched Keith back the truck under the carport and then clamber out.

“Greeting me at the door, huh?” Keith said as he approached, hands jammed into the front pockets of his leather bomber. He bounded up the stairs, two at a time. “Missed me that much?”

“Of course,” Shiro said, catching Keith along his elbow and drawing him in. He leaned down to leave a kiss on Keith’s lips, grainy stubble rough along his jaw, and was slow to part. A shiver ran through him as the wind picked up, drawing out goosepimples along his bare arms; he ushered Keith inside, bolted the door against the chill, and helped him out of his jacket.

Even taking a day off didn’t dissuade Shiro from working. His scribbled notes were scattered across flat surfaces throughout the living room and kitchen, and the couch was once again research central, its arms stacked high with dusty books sourced through Allura’s considerable network of academic acquaintances.

Keith spread his fingers across one loose page on the kitchen counter, rotating it to make heads or tails of Shiro’s hurried script. Neither the equations scrawled along the margins nor the annotations made any sense to Keith, but he knew the diagram at the center of the page: the rift, or Shiro’s working understanding of it, at least.

And despite his busy day off, Shiro had still dragged himself into town to pick up dinner, which meant there was chilled pizza sitting in the fridge, along with biodegradable containers of pre-sliced fruit, vegetables, and a massive tub of tapioca pudding.

Keith grabbed himself a slice before settling on the couch beside Shiro. They nestled close, with Keith shifting to accommodate Shiro’s wriggling, heat-seeking feet as they wedged themselves between his butt and the couch cushions. He chomped away at the mushroom and pepperoni pizza as he scrolled through some assigned reading, the repetitious clack of Shiro’s keyboard a quiet comfort.

With the fire burning low in the hearth, the cabin felt cozy and subdued. The shadows thrown across the walls of the room shifted and flickered with the flames. The firelight danced across the aluminum of Shiro’s arm, the polished curve of his engagement band. It warmed their home with the smell of smoke and ash, like the campfires Keith had grown up with, and that alone went a long way toward making him feel safe.

A handful of void-creatures still lurked out among the wooded groves and riverbeds, Keith knew, waiting to be tracked and dispatched. So did a certain rift-witch, whom Keith _desperately_ wanted to introduce to his luxite blade. Or a gallon of lighter fluid and an acetylene torch. Or maybe the sheer three-thousand foot drop from the observatory on Black Lion Mountain. He’d let Shiro pick, if the choice ever presented itself.

Absent of thought, his hand went to Shiro’s nape to rake along the buzzed portion of his undercut, the drag of his nails earning a contented sigh. He resolved to get Shiro to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. Even now he was squinting at the tiny kanji on his laptop screen, already missing his reading glasses.

“Remind me why we’re doing two weddings,” Shiro said, the words muffled by his hands as he dragged them slowly up and down his face.

Keith leaned on his shoulder and patted his thigh. His knowledge of Japanese was minimal, but it looked like the site wasn’t letting him book the reservation he wanted. “Because it was either that or we bring all your relatives _here_. A logistical nightmare.”

“Right. Glad we avoided that,” he muttered as he scribbled something down in his calendar for June. Between planning their courthouse wedding here and the more formal affair for his family back in Nara, Shiro had filled his planner with a wall of reminders and to-do’s, its sides a mess of protruding sticky-notes and dog-eared pages.

“Plus, you’re so nice I wanna marry you twice,” Keith said, pecking Shiro’s cheek twice in quick succession.

That made Shiro grin, even as he launched into a long complaint about having to call and change the arrangements for the reception dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, as Lance continued to vacillate on whether or not he’d be bringing a date. 

A knock at the door interrupted Shiro’s retelling, quieting the both of them into an apprehensive silence, still as statuary under the play of light from the fireplace.

The clock read ten-twelve, and the knock came again, hesitance behind each rap against the solid oaken door.

Keith was already on his feet, padding stealthily toward a window, cautious as he tried to glimpse a peek through the drapes and drawn blinds. His dagger— never more than an arm’s length away these days— was already in hand, his thumb stroking along its sleek hilt.

Possibilities flitted through his mind, from the best case scenario to the worst, mundane to peak supernatural: lost hiker, ax-murderer, rift-creature, _vampire_. Keith wasn’t quick to dismiss anything out of hand anymore.

No matter how he angled himself, Keith couldn’t catch a glimpse of whoever or whatever stood on their porch, waiting at the door. From the corner of his eye, he could see Shiro loading his black-barreled shotgun with short, practiced movements.

A true worst-cast scenario came to mind as Keith pressed closer to the window, his heart racing— the rift-witch. _Haggar_ , as Shiro had called her in those first frantic moments after they pulled him free of the tiny corner of the void where she had left him, as they were pursued by a cadre of her masked, otherworldly servants. Surely the witch must hate them as much as Keith loathed her, for ruining her work and stealing her prize.

But the figure that took a step back from the door and fell into Keith’s line of sight didn’t seem so alien, so evil. Even silhouetted in full shadow, blotting what moonlight might’ve otherwise fallen onto their front porch’s floorboards, it was _familiar_ —

Keith scissored his fingers between the slats of the blinds and drew them wide, blatantly obvious as he peered out.

As if to aid him, the ambient light from a phone screen bloomed in the dark outside. The weak, electronic-blue glow illuminated a face Keith had last seen in another world, a lifetime away, before he and Shiro had been shoved through the rift and left to watch as it sealed itself from within.

“Kuro,” Keith breathed, the name spreading like a tumble of fog from his mouth, sinking deep into the gaps in the woodwork. Somewhere out of sight, still positioned near the counter and the box of shotgun shells it held, Shiro took a deep breath and muttered something unintelligible. “ _How_?”

It was him, still wearing Shiro’s likeness as he stared back at Keith through the glass pane, waiting. Still cast from the same mold, although the mimicry was far from exact. Modified— intentionally, this time, as opposed to discrepancies birthed by a lapse in control. It reminded Keith of one of those _find the difference_ puzzles from the old newspapers his father had used as firestarter, as he hunted for which little details Kuro had decided to break and re-shape to his liking.

His irises were pale instead of Shiro’s iron-grey— maybe amber, close to the golden color of quintessence— and his hair was a little overgrown, unruly in a manner that had Keith thinking of the awkward high school pictures of Shiro that lined the hallway of his aunt’s house. He bore no scars to lose track of, no ridge of healed bone along his nose, and his right arm lacked the plated gleam of Shiro’s prosthetic.

The knowledge that he was _here_ — back in their world, somehow, having escaped the horde of rift-creatures that had chased them to the very bounds of that reality— threw Keith off-center. Dilemmas they had been spared— like how to reconcile Shiro and Kuro’s co-existence in the same world, what sort of relationship they would have or have not— now reared up anew.

“Do we let him in?” Keith whispered. He couldn’t distance his thoughts from the fact that without crossing paths with Kuro, he might’ve wandered the park for a decade, never knowing that Shiro lay prisoner under his feet, trapped in another world where the air burned and the void sang until his skull felt like a tuning fork. Keith might never have found him  _at all_.

Shiro considered it, the tip of a metal finger stroking along the stock of the shotgun still poised in his arms. Something in his jaw clicked, hard and resolute.

“Not like he couldn’t get in if he really wanted to. But… sure. Sure. I mean, he did save our lives,” Shiro sighed as he brushed back the bone-white fringe at his brow. “Even if he took mine out for a test drive, first.”

The complaint was more than justified. Keith opened his mouth to say as much.

“Plus, I’ve still got a bone to pick with that guy,” Shiro added, pumping the shotgun as he strode toward the front door.

“ _Shiro!_ ”

“I’m kidding, Keith. _Kidding_. Mostly,” he added under his breath as he started unlocking the heavy bolts and chains that Keith had taken the precaution of installing. Shiro hesitated and looked to Keith before undoing the last one, the heel of his palm resting against oak he as curled his fingers and rubbed his thumb over the smooth band around his ring finger. “Not that a bullet could kill him, anyway.”

“Probably not,” Keith agreed, thinking of the creatures they had been dealing with all year, slowed by buckshot and machete swipes but never outright _killed_. Luxite alone seemed up to the task.

He spun his dagger into a reverse-grip, his fingers flexing before they tightened around the hilt. The gesture carried a silent promise, an assurance that they weren’t _entirely_ at the mercy of a being that could drain the life from them for a snack, if the whim took him.

An unnecessary gesture, Keith hoped— an overabundance of caution, given that Kuro had risked his own existence to see them to safety once before. But he was weary of losing Shiro, bone-tired of having to hunt him across land and spacetime. He was ill-prepared and unwilling to suffer it again, and would sooner go down in a sacrificial blaze than see the man he loved ripped away once more.

It was a fight Keith would rather not pick, but would certainly _finish_.

A soft smile rounded Shiro’s lips as the edges of Keith’s dagger flashed in the firelight. His gaze swept upward, affection etched around his eyes, worry sewn in the pinch of his upturned brows. Shiro looked on him with open admiration, his lips gently parted as he stared at Keith like he was the first and last of his kind, the most awe-inspiring being to walk this world or any other. The strong column of his throat flexed as he swallowed, hard— the extent of his visible nerves.

Shiro flipped the last latch, gun still gripped in his metal hand, a synthetic finger curled loose around the trigger. “Here’s hoping this doesn’t turn into some evil twin bullshit.”

That Kuro had carved himself a new identity out of Shiro’s likeness reassured Keith, oddly enough, that their local bodysnatcher wasn’t looking to re-insert himself in Shiro’s place. If anything, the tattooed sleeve up his right arm and other customizations said the opposite— that he was evolving into something less Shiro and more Kuro, seeking distinction rather than perfect imitation.

“It looks like he’s, uh, doing his own thing now. But whatever happens, I’ll be right here,” Keith promised, his free hand curling around Shiro’s forearm. Shiro was back at his side again after too long missing, and Keith was going to keep it that way. “And I’m not one to be fooled twice.”

Another knock startled the both of them, with Shiro reflexively lifting the shotgun and tucking the stock into the juncture of his shoulder, taking aim at the center of the door.

The voice from the other side came through weak and muffled, its impatience plain. “It’s _me_ , Kuro. I’m— I _saved_ your _lives_.” A pause, probably for some long exhale. “And the McDonald’s is getting cold…”

Shiro sighed, head tilting toward Keith as he lowered his gun again. A quick exchange of glances had Shiro smoothly wrenching the door open, with Keith standing ready at his flank.

Kuro stood at the threshold, no longer Shiro’s mirror-image but some new variant, blended from memories of past iterations and accented with striking details of his own making. Amber eyes lingered on each of them in turn, dryly disappointed— but there was no menace, no readily apparent threat.

“Really? You’ll open the door for McDonald’s, but not for me?”

“Stop bitching and get inside,” Shiro said, waving Kuro in with the shotgun. He eyed Kuro every step, every inch, mouth drawn into a stiff line. “I’ll move my notes and we can eat at the table and discuss… _this_.”

Kuro entered slow and cautious, here in the cabin for the first time as an acknowledged guest. He was wary of Shiro, hardly tearing his eyes from the man as he laid the shotgun on the counter and started clearing books and notepads from the table.

And likewise, Keith watched _him_ , reading every little flick of his gaze and stiff step.

_Nervous_ , if Keith had to guess what the rift-walking void-monster was feeling as he clutched onto the two paper bags filled with fast-food. Awkward and uncertain of where he stood. Maybe more worried about their reactions than they had been of his intent.

Shiro noticed it, too, as he did most things, and only let Kuro squirm for a few more seconds. The corner of his mouth twitched, precursor to a faint but sympathetic smile. “Glad you made it out of there, Kuro.”

So few words affected Kuro’s entire demeanor. It was like a thread at the top of his skull snapped, letting the rest of his body relax. “Me, too. You’d be surprised at how many friends Haggar has on the inside…”

Keith didn’t miss Kuro’s little wince, nor Shiro's. Personal as Keith’s vendetta with her was, it ran deep as bone-marrow for Shiro— carved into his skin as a daily reminder, stitched into the parts of his mind that wove his dreams into nightmares. That she was still out there somewhere troubled Keith far more than the lone rift-creatures still stalking the woods, and kept him and Shiro awake in each others’ arms.

Keith caught Kuro’s eye for a moment, briefly taken aback by the new color— so bright where he was used to finding dark and stormy grey, so clear and cutting that Keith almost found himself unnerved.

It was strange, seeing Kuro in clothes of his own, unfamiliar and markedly more fashionable than anything Shiro wore. It was strange seeing him again at all, in the flesh. Strange to see him and feel _relief_ , an abatement to the guilt Keith had spent the last year trying not to dwell on. “It’s a little late— about a year late, actually— but thanks, from both of us. It’s good to have you back.”

Kuro returned Keith’s smile with one of his own, sincere and heart-warmed and now sporting pointed, fangish canines. “Good to be back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took longer than I thought it would— ending things is hard for me, lol.  
> The positive response to this fic has honestly floored me!! So much! Thank you for giving it a chance and sticking through this with me. :)))

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! i only write fluff so ty for bearing with me through an attempt at something slightly spookier.


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